The interim government of Syria is gathering people from the many religions and seven of the country for a two -day national dialogue that started on Monday.
What is the national dialogue?
Ahmed Al-Shara, an interim president of the country, whose rebellious coalition seized the control of Syria in early December, promised to keep a national dialogue to discuss the formation of a representative government.
His government has set a deadline of March 1st to start the trial. The invitations for the event were sent on Sunday 23 February to hundreds of participants, including the leaders of the community, academics and religious leaders, only one day before the start of the conference.
Journalists, businessmen, activists, former prisoners of the Assad government and families of people who were killed or wounded in the brutal 13 -year -old civil war were also invited.
And the Kurds?
Al-Shara spoke of the need to combine the many fractured populations of Syria to build a new Syria. Syria is a Sunni Muslim majority country but has many religious and ethnic minorities, including Alawites, druses, Christians and Kurds.
But Unity’s attempts have already faced the challenges.
Some Kurds, which make up about 10 percent of the Syrian population, have been invited to dialogue. But the Syrian democratic forces with Kurdish guided, a militia supported by the United States that controls much of the north-east of Syria, were not. The interim government of Syria has requested that the militia disarches and unites itself to a unified national military force, as a condition to join the dialogue.
The committee that organizes the conference has previously stated that the SDF does not represent all the Syrian Kurds.
Turkey, a close ally of the rebel group that led the reversal of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, has tried for years to curb the power of the Syrian democratic forces, claiming that the militia is linked to the Kurdish separatist insurgents inside Turkey .
What will come out of dialogue?
Many Syrians are skeptical about what a national dialogue can lead, especially in a deeply divided country in which sectarian tensions pour into the killings of revenge.
The Syrians are also wary of the promises of inclusiveness from a government led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist group that has given government and ministerial positions to its loyalists. It has yet to include other rebellious groups in the government that have contributed to oust Mr. Assad.
The organizers of the Conference said that there is no direct link between the formation of the new Syrian government and the dialogue conference, although they are happening at the same time.
The participants in the conference will issue recommendations for the new government, as well as for the drafting of a new constitution and laws. But these recommendations seem not binding.
“The recommendations from national dialogue will not be simple advice and formalities, but they will be the basis for the provisional constitutional declaration, the economic identity and the institutional reform plan,” said Hassan al-Dughaim, spokesperson for the committee.