Brussels, 10/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - During the evening of Monday 9 May, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini and France's Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault both announced that a new meeting of the international support group for Syria will take place next week. US Secretary of State John Kerry said the following day that the meeting will be held on Tuesday 17 May.
“We support unanimously the joint statement of Russia and the United States on the need to reinvigorate the cessation of hostilities which prepares the ground for the next meeting of the international support group for Syria we will have next week”, Mogherini said in a video statement recorded at the end of the Friends of Syria meeting in Paris (with representatives from the EU, Germany, the UK, Italy, France, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan and the USA - see EUROPE 11547). “Our meeting aimed at preparing the next meeting of the international support group for Syria, which should be held in Vienna next week. It is a question of being efficient and of checking the points of convergence and the diagnosis that we should bring on the situation and also on the priorities on which we must mobilise. This next meeting will be a full meeting and will also bring together the Syrian parties and Iran, and I hope we will be able to make progress next week”, Ayrault added in a press statement.
Underlining the regime's “numerous violations” of the truce, the weak progress as regards access to humanitarian aid on the ground, and the fact that the regime has shown no resolve to move towards transition in the political negotiations in Geneva, Ayrault said that “mobilisation of the international community” was “crucial”.
The last meeting of the international support group for Syria took place in Vienna on 11-12 February 2016. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)