By Fatih Erel
GENEVA
Organizers of planned UN-backed Syria peace talks for May expect all sides to the conflict to attend despite the ongoing violence ravaging the country.
A UN spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, told The Anadolu Agency in Geneva that the Syrian regime and "as many as possible" opposition groups would attend the talks in Switzerland next month.
However, Fawzi said that the "low-profile" meetings would not be a repeat of earlier, unsuccessful high-level negotiations.
"[These] Geneva consultations on Syria will be very low key and low profile. This is not ‘Geneva 3’," he said, speaking Tuesday.
The 4-6-week talks will come ahead of the June three-year anniversary of the international Geneva Communique which laid out a six-point plan to stop the violence and move the two sides in Syria towards a political settlement.
However, fighting has continued to devastate the country. After the failure of Geneva peace talks in 2014, former UN special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, resigned.
Staffan de Mistura, a former UN special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq, succeeded Brahimi as international mediator in July last year.
Fawzi added: "It is unacceptable to the whole world what is going on today. We have a country destroyed. We have hundreds of thousands of deaths; we have millions of refugees and displaced people.
"We cannot just sit back, and the special envoy has decided it is time to take stock of where we are and how we can move forward."
The list of those attending in Geneva is not expected to be made public.
Syria's civil war, now in its fifth year, has killed more than 220,000 people and forced almost four million to flee the country.
