MOSCOW, May 26 (RIA Novosti) – Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said on Sunday Damascus will attend next month’s peace conference in Geneva aimed at helping resolve the country's crisis.
President Bashar Assad's regime has agreed "in principle to participate in the international conference which is supposed to be convened in Geneva," Aljazeera quoted Muallem, who arrived in Baghdad, as saying.
"We think... that the international conference represents a good opportunity for a political solution to the crisis in Syria," Muallem said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced after a Moscow meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on May 7 that the two countries had decided to hold an international conference, aimed at facilitating a solution to the Syrian crisis through political dialogue. Moscow wants to involve all the nations which took part in the Geneva conference on Syria last summer. The conference is expected to be held at the beginning of June.
Syria has been locked in an increasingly bloody civil war since demonstrations broke out against Assad regime in March 2011. According to UN estimates, some 80,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
