‘No cease-fire in Syria’

UN Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has admitted that there will be no cease-fire in Syria as sides wait to attend the long-awaited Geneva peace conference.

Brahimi said both sides of Syria’s civil war now agreed that there was no military solution to the conflict. ‘Some time ago, both sides were absolutely certain that they were winning,’ Brahimi told CNN, reports daily Hurriyet. ‘Now, individuals on each side tell me that there is no military solution.’ An international peace conference aimed at the civil war will be held on January 22, the first face-to-face talks between the government of president Bashar al-Assad and rebels seeking to overthrow him, the United Nations announced this week. Brahimi cited the document in the first peace conference in 2012 which called for ‘an immediate cessation of violence in all its forms’. He admitted that ‘things have changed’ since then.