Aletho News

Some 30 towns, villages in Syria’s Hama join national reconciliation

Press TV – March 3, 2016

Some 30 towns and villages in the Syrian province of Hama have joined the national reconciliation process in the war-torn country through the mediation of the Russian center for reconciliation, the head of the center says.

“The work is very meticulous and delicate, everything here is based on religious and national matters, but overall about 30 communities have signed an application form to join the peace process and negotiations,” Lt. Col. German Rudenko told reporters on Thursday.

Rudenko noted that the agreement signed by representatives of local communities includes points banning the use of weapons against government forces, facilitating the peace process and return of state power to the region.

On Monday, a large number of militants from Syria’s southern province of Dara’a put down their weapons in exchange for amnesty from the government.

The militants filed their personal information and wrote a letter vowing not to engage in any anti-government activities. The government will provide them with certificates in the future to get back to normal life.

Under the national reconciliation, devised by the Syrian government, citizens who have been involved in the five-year-old militancy in the Arab country could become part of a rehabilitation program if they promise to lay down weapons and accept government investigation. The Syrian Ministry for National Reconciliation Affairs was established in 2012.

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the ceasefire agreement in Syria, which was brokered by Russia and the United States and entered into force on February 27, has been violated 31 times over the past three days.

Zakharova did not specify which side of the conflict had broken the truce.

When asked about the presence of the Kurds in the upcoming peace talks in Geneva on March 9, Zakharova said the participants are invited by the United Nations, but Russia believes that peace talks without the participation of the Kurds will be imperfect.

“The talks without the participation of the Kurds will be incomplete, and it will affect the process, because the Kurds have a large population, they are a faction and they have participated in the ground counter-terrorism operations. It is not correct to ignore or take no account of these factors only because some delegates don’t want the Kurds to participate in it,” she said.

Turkey has already announced opposition to the presence of the Kurds in the peace talks. Ankara regards the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and its umbrella group the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) as an ally of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, which has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.

Turkey has been heavily shelling the positions of Syrian Kurdish fighters who are battling Takfiri groups near the two countries’ border.

The Syrian government has said it accepts the terms of the deal on condition that military efforts against Daesh and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front continue.

Photo – © Sputnik/ Iliya Pitalev

March 3, 2016 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Russia, Syria, Turkey, YPG