REPORT: Syria talks in disarray before they begin

Syrian and international delegates were arriving in Switzerland on Tuesday on the eve of peace talks that few believe can succeed as the three-year-old civil war and geopolitical acrimony it has brought show no sign of abating.

Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad, pressured to attend Wednesday's first direct negotiations by their Western backers, cited new, photographic evidence of widespread torture and killing by Syria's government in renewing their demand that Assad must quit and face an international war crimes trial.   

War crimes lawyers said a vast, smuggled cache of images from a Syrian military police photographer gave clear evidence of systematic abuse and murder of some 11,000 detainees. One of three former international war crimes prosecutors who signed the report compared the images from Syria to the "industrial-scale killing" of Nazi death camps.        

The United Nations, along with co-sponsors Russia and the United States, may at least be relieved if and when the two sides sit down at the Montreux Palace hotel on Lake Geneva. A day of diplomatic chaos on Monday had threatened to scupper the event entirely, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave a last-minute invite to Iran, Assad's main foreign supporter.   

The invitation was withdrawn after a boycott threat from the opposition, Western pressure and Iran's insistence it had never agreed to the condition Ban set for attendance - that it endorse a previous peace conference, at Geneva in 2012, which called for Assad to make way for a transitional administration.   

Narrowing the gap between the warring parties seems a tall order and diplomats at the United Nations stress the meeting at Montreux on Wednesday, to be followed possibly by further talks in Geneva from Friday, is only a beginning. It could produce some deals to ease civilian suffering and exchange prisoners.        

And while the United Nations mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, notionally has the consensus support of world powers, the uproar over the invitation to Tehran illustrated how the war has divided Western powers from Russia and set the Sunni Arab states which back the rebels against Shi'ite Iran. 

The talks could increase the already ferocious internal strife among rival opposition factions, however. The conference is being boycotted by the powerful Sunni Islamist factions that control substantial territory inside Syria. They have denounced the exiled political opposition as traitors for attending. 

The U.N. secretary-general arrived in Geneva, having nearly torpedoed them with his botched invitation to Iran. Aides shielded him from reporters' questions about the affair.   

Western countries have long insisted Tehran sign up to the final statement from Geneva-1 before it could attend other talks. Ban said Iran's foreign minister had told him Tehran accepted the 2012 statement, which includes a requirement that Syria set up a transitional government.   

But Tehran said it had agreed to no such thing.   

A Western diplomat described the day as "a real mess" and said Ban had made a gaffe that had almost led to the entire conference being cancelled and replaced with a bilateral meeting between Russia and the United States.   

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi blamed Washington for the confusion. "We had repeatedly said that Iran would not accept any precondition," he told state television.


REUTERS

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