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New Syria Envoy Gives Bleak Appraisal as Warplanes Hit Aleppo At U.N., New Syria Envoy Gives Bleak Appraisal
(about 7 hours later)
UNITED NATIONS — The newly appointed Syria peace envoy gave a bleak assessment of the stalemated war there on Monday, telling Security Council diplomats that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had no wish to change and that there was no immediate prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough. UNITED NATIONS — Prospects for any settlement in the Syria conflict remain dismal, but not impossible, the new Syria peace envoy said Monday, telling Security Council diplomats that the government of President Bashar al-Assad still clung to the notion that pre-revolution Syria could be resurrected.
The assessment of the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran United Nations diplomat and former Algerian foreign minister who represents both the United Nations and Arab League, was his first to the Security Council since he took over the position at the end of August from Kofi Annan, who resigned in frustration. It was the first report to the Security Council by Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran United Nations troubleshooter and former Algerian foreign minister who took on the job of Syria peace envoy three weeks ago after his predecessor, Kofi Annan, resigned in frustration. The envoy serves both the United Nations and the Arab League.
Mr. Brahimi spoke on a day of fierce Syrian government attacks on the Syrian city of Aleppo, with antigovernment activists reporting at least eight people including four children killed by shelling of residential buildings. “The situation in Syria is dire and getting worse by the day,” Mr. Brahimi told reporters after briefing the council in a closed meeting. Food shortages loom because the harvest was bad, and Syria’s former self-sufficiency in goods like pharmaceuticals has evaporated with so many factories destroyed or closed by the spiraling violence, diplomats quoted him as saying.
The Security Council meeting was held in private, but diplomats told reporters afterward that Mr. Brahimi had told them that Mr. Assad’s government appeared entrenched in its belief that the Syria conflict is a foreign-instigated plot and that Mr. Assad wants to return the country to the political structure that existed before the uprising against him broke out in March 2011. A political solution has proved elusive since the fighting began in March last year.
Speaking to reporters later outside the Council chambers, Mr. Brahimi said: “All I can tell you is that the situation is indeed extremely difficult. There is a stalemate, there is no prospect today or tomorrow to move forward.” “There is a stalemate; there is no prospect today or tomorrow to move forward,” Mr. Brahimi said to reporters. But “now that I have found out a little bit more about what is happening in the country and the region, I think we will find an opening in the not too distant future.”
Still, in a glimmer of optimism, he said: “Now that I have found out a little bit more about what is happening in the country and the region, I think we will find an opening in the not-too-distant future. I refuse to believe that reasonable people do not see that you cannot go backward, that you cannot go back to the Syria of the past. I told everybody in Damascus and elsewhere that reform is not enough anymore, what is needed is change.” Council diplomats said he told them that in talks with Mr. Assad last week, he found that the Syrian leader wanted to return to the old Syria rather than install any serious political change.
Mr. Brahimi visited Damascus last week and met with Mr. Assad, and said then that the crisis was deteriorating and that he had not yet formulated a plan to stem the violence. He reiterated to reporters at the United Nations that he still does not have a plan. “I refuse to believe that reasonable people do not see that you cannot go backward, that you cannot go back to the Syria of the past,” Mr. Brahimi said at the news conference. “I told everybody in Damascus and elsewhere that reform is not enough anymore, what is needed is change.”
The shelling in Aleppo appeared to be part of a broader attack by the Syrian government that included the use of warplanes to bomb targets on the outskirts of Aleppo, the northern city that had been Syria’s commercial epicenter and is now a battleground in the conflict. Still, he stressed that he did not have a specific new plan, but was relying on the never-implemented six-point peace plan, basically a cease-fire, first proposed by Mr. Annan, as well as a communiqué calling for a political transition that many nations, including Syria’s staunch supporters Russia and China, signed off on in June.
Activist groups gave conflicting accounts on the attack that destroyed the buildings in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group that receives reports from sources inside Syria, said the neighborhood came under shelling. Elsewhere in the city, a rebel battalion commander a fighter were killed in clashes with government troops. Senior Arab officials and many United Nations diplomats have suggested that that plan needs to be revisited since although all five council members had signed off on it they all objected to it later, but it does call for a political transition.
Other activists said warplanes or helicopters bombed the neighborhood. Video disseminated by activists on Monday showed people frantically searching through the rubble for survivors. The Security Council has been sharply divided on the issue of Syria, with Moscow and Beijing vetoing three resolutions. Many officials believe without that split, Damascus could not continue its violent, widespread oppression that, according to United Nations estimates, has killed more than 20,000 people.
One activist in Aleppo said that electricity was cut off to the city at about 6 p.m. on Sunday night, often a precursor to an attack by the military. Warplanes could be heard flying overhead. On Monday, “Aleppo woke up to the sound of aerial bombing and heavy artillery shelling,” said another activist. Mr. Brahimi also told the council that senior Syrian officials continue to argue that the uprising is a foreign plot rather than a peaceful protest movement and to claim that there are 5,000 foreign fighters in the country.
On Sunday, domestic opposition groups, searching for another way forward, gathered in the capital Damascus in a rare instance of officially tolerated dissent, and called for Mr. Assad’s removal from power. Although Mr. Brahimi stuck basically to a factual narrative of the situation, there was an undercurrent of frustration in the way he described it, diplomats said. He told Mr. Assad that his reforms were insufficient, and pointed out that most of those being detained by the government were Syrians, not foreigners, they said.
The meeting, in a Damascus hotel tightly guarded by government security agents, brought together representatives of about 20 domestic opposition groups, including leftists and longtime dissidents who have struggled to stay relevant as the uprising has become a war. The raging conflict is expected to be the focus of the United Nations general debate this week, with some 120 heads of state or government gathering in New York. Although no new initiatives on Syria are expected, some new ideas are being floated.

Neil MacFarquhar reported from the United Nations, and Kareem Fahim from Antakya, Turkey. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The opposition must develop a “common, democratic pluralistic platform” to reassure several hundred possible high level defectors that they have a future in Syria, Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, told reporters. “This includes religious and ethnic tolerance.”
Representatives of many council nations, including Russia, India, France and Portugal, expressed the need to do more to reassure the Alawite religious minority that rules Syria that its rights would be guaranteed, diplomats said.
Still, the usual divisions on Syria were on display in the closed-door meeting, diplomats said. The Russians said more had to be done to stop the arming of the opposition, while the West blamed the Assad government.
Mr. Brahimi said the full council needed to unite behind his efforts, and members seemed ready to give him the necessary time to come up with a plan. He is expected to return to the region next week and to visit Moscow and Beijing.
“It is premature for any plan of action,” said Mohammed Loulichki, Morocco’s envoy to the United Nations, who attended Mr. Brahimi’s briefing.
“He gave a realistic, very factual assessment,” he said. “If you want to prevent yourself from being disappointed, you have to be very cautious.”