Syria ready for peace talks 'without conditions'
Syrian President Bashar Assad is ready to resume peace talks with Israel “without conditions,” a top UN envoy said today.
It was not immediately clear if Damascus was willing to return to the point where talks broke off four years ago.
Syrian peace negotiations with Israel collapsed in 2000 when Israel offered to withdraw from most of Syria’s Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that it captured during the 1967 Mideast War and later annexed.
“President Assad has reiterated to me today that he has an outstretched hand to his Israeli counterparts and that he is willing to go to the table without conditions,” UN Mideast envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said following talks with the Syrian president in Damascus.
Since taking office in July 2000 following the death of his father, Assad has said Syria is ready to resume peace talks with Israel, but he has insisted they begin where they left off in 2000.
