Syrian negotiators on Tuesday held their first face-to-face meeting this month as US and Russian officials prepared to join the stalemated peace talks in Geneva.
The meeting broke up after three hours; both sides said the session failed to produce an agreement on the agenda.
International mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said peace talks between the Syrian government and opposition are not making much progress.
"The beginning of this week is as laborious as it was in the first week. We are not making much progress," he told a news conference in Geneva after a joint meeting of the two sides.
"Of course for it to really take off we need cooperation from both sides here and a lot of support from the outside."
Brahimi said he planned to report to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council within the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, opposition spokesman Louay Safi told reporters after talks with Brahimi that there has been no progress.
“Even on the agenda, the regime was arguing with Mr. Brahimi, not allowing him to come up with an agenda acceptable by all parties."
"These people are not here to come up with a political solution, but they're insisting on killing people in Syria to maintain the rule of the one person and dictatorship," he said. "I want to say to the Syrian people that we will not be here endlessly. There will come a time when it will become clear the regime does not want any solution and we will exert moral pressure on the UN to take a position."
Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad blamed the opposition for "another lost day."
"This group of opposition, the coalition, is insisting to waste your and our time," he said. "Today they wasted all the time discussing nothing, saying that there is no terrorism in Syria."
For his part, Monzer Akbik, a senior member of the Syrian opposition delegation, told reporters that his side presented a paper outlining its "vision for the political solution in Syria" and that delegates may hold bilateral meetings with US and Russian officials on Friday.
UN officials confirmed that there will be a three-way meeting in Geneva on Friday including Brahimi, Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Gennady Gatilov and US undersecretary of state for political affairs Wendy Sherman. Syrian negotiators also may join in bilateral meetings with the Americans and Russians.
Akbik said officers from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have arrived in Geneva to run a "military advisory room" that helps coordinate security issues related to the peace talks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov, whose nation has joined with China in vetoing three other Western-backed resolutions on Syria, said in Moscow that the latest draft resolution was a "one-sided" effort to blame Assad's government for holding up aid.
For his part, US President Barack Obama said the United States does not see a military solution in Syria at the moment.
In a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande, Obama also said Washington had delivered a strong message to Russia regarding the well-being of Syrian civilians in that country's civil war.
"Secretary (of State John) Kerry and others have delivered a very direct message to the Russians that they cannot say they are concerned about the well-being of the Syrian people when there are starving civilians," Obama said.
He added: "Right now we don't think that there is a military solution per se to the problem but the situation is fluid and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue to solve this problem."
The U.N. refugee agency's spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Syrian authorities are holding more than 300 men between the ages of 15 and 55 who took advantage of a U.N.-brokered ceasefire to flee from the besieged rebel-held Old City of Homs.
Some 1,132 people were evacuated in the past four days as part of a deal that requires men of fighting age to be questioned, Fleming said in Geneva. Syrian authorities had questioned 336 men in Homs province and released 41, and the refugee agency is monitoring those still held in an abandoned school, she said.
REUTERS/AP
To watch Remy Derbass Sleiman's report, please click on the VIDEO above