Negotiators at Syria Peace Talks Can’t Even Agree on Humanitarian Aid

600 Days Into Siege, Homs Talks and Battle Both Stalemated

600 days into the fight, Syria’s rebels retain control over central Homs, and the army holds the rest of the city. Its a siege both sides agree is unproductive, and causing a humanitarian crisis.

The war itself is stalemated, as it has been for many months now, and the talks on opening up the area to humanitarian aid seem just as stalemated, with neither side willing to give in to reach a deal.

The government offered to let women and children out of central Homs, a proposal spurned as a “ploy” by the rebels, and while the opposition at the Geneva talks pushes for convoy access, neither the government nor rebel fighters on the ground seem to be able to come up with terms of how that would work, leading the UN to conclude deliveries are impossible.

The Homs talks seem to be moving at the same snail’s pace as talks about everything else at the Geneva II conference, where both sides seem more interested in using the lack of resolution to portray the other as unreasonable than they do at making deals on individual problems.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.