Russian Foreign Minister announces a new meeting on Syria in Astana
According to RIA News, Sergey Lavrov, the Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, announced that the next meeting on Syria would be held in Astana on July 10th.
According to him, the special representative of the UN Special Envoy for Syria. Staffan de Mistura will participate in the event.
“It was at this meeting that the parties agreed to finalize the agreement on the specific parameters of the modalities for ensuring the regime exists in the de-escalation zones and along their perimeter,” as stated by Lavrov at a press conference following the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the BRICS countries taking place in Beijing.
On May 4th in Astana, the guarantor countries, Russia, Iran, and Turkey, signed a memorandum on the establishment of safe zones in Syria. According to the document, in four of these zones (in the province of Idlib, north of the city of Homs, in eastern Gut, and in the south of the country), fighting between government forces and the opposition would stop as of May 6th for six months with subsequent extensions. The civil war in Syria has been ongoing since March 2011. The victims of the supporters and opponents of Bashar Al-Assad were, according to human rights activists, up to 450,000 people, about 5 million Syrians have become refugees.