(Montreux) – Peace talks to carve a path out of Syria’s civil war got off to a rocky start as a bitter clash over President Bashar Assad’s future threatened to collapse the negotiations even before they had begun. The dispute over Assad cast a pall over an international conference that aims to map out a transitional government and ultimately a democratic election for the country mired in fighting that has killed more than 130,000 people and displaced millions.
While diplomats sparred against a pristine Alpine backdrop, Syrian forces and opposition fighters clashed across a wide area from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to Daraa in the south, activists and state media said. Just hours into the talks in the Swiss city of Montreux, the two sides seemed impossibly far apart. Complicating matters, both Assad’s delegates and the Western-backed opposition Syrian National Coalition claimed to speak for the Syrian people.
The US and the Syrian opposition opened the conference by saying that Assad lost his legitimacy when he crushed the once-peaceful protest movement against his regime.
