The Syrian government announced Friday it will take part in a second round of peace talks in Geneva next week, as a first batch of civilians prepared to leave besieged rebel-held areas in a battleground Syrian city under an evacuation deal struck with the United Nations.<\/p>\n
The Syrian opposition has also said it will take part in the second round of talks. The first was adjourned with no signs of progress on Jan. 31.<\/p>\n
The negotiations aim to broker a political solution to Syria’s civil war. The nearly three-year conflict has killed more than 130,000 people, forced more than 2.3 million to seek refuge abroad, and sent sectarian tensions soaring across the region.<\/p>\n
State TV quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad as saying that the government delegation will head to the talks scheduled to resume on Monday in Geneva.<\/p>\n
Also Friday, the governor of the central Syrian province of Homs said the evacuation of civilians from besieged rebel-held neighborhoods in the provincial capital is expected to begin “within hours.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Syrian government announced Friday it will take part in a second round of peace…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":68334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,224,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east","category-news","category-world","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/68334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}