Syrians take cover as a second bomb explodes while they were undertaking a rescue attempt at a building that was hit by a previous bomb during an air raid by government forces in the northern Syrian city of Al Bab yesterday.
DOHA: Syria’s splintered opposition factions that kicked off their historic meeting here yesterday hope to expand and restructure the Syrian National Council (SNC) with a view to forming a provisional government-in-exile.
The SNC, though, faces an uphill task in ensuring fair representation to all Syrian opposition groups and many of those present at the meet said they expected their conclave to be marathon and could continue until Thursday when a follow-up meeting has been convened by the Arab League and Qatar — which heads a key intra-League panel on Syria.
A Syrian opposition group, the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, has meanwhile boycotted the Doha meet saying enough preparations have not been made to hold this conclave and that they were not invited to take part in the preparatory process.
However, a follow-up meeting scheduled to be held here on Thursday’s is likely to take up the crucial issue of the expansion of the SNC and its success holds the key to installing a provisional Syrian government-in-exile.
Thursday’s meeting will be consultative and it is expected that all opposition and army groups will be fairly represented in it so that the expansion and restructuring of the SNC could become a reality, Aljazeera.net reported yesterday. The news website said Syrian politicians attending yesterday’s meet expect that their conclave would continue for three more days until Thursday and that the membership base of the SNC would be expanded from the present 300 to 400 to include all opposition factions.
SNC is to be the largest coalition of the Syrian opposition outside their country and the Council will be discussing a proposal put forward by a former parliamentarian, Riyadh Said, to find a new leadership for the Council that represents all local councils in Syria as well as military and Islamic clerics’ bodies.
It is hoped that the new and expanded structure of the SNC would be able to adopt the proposal of forming a provisional Syrian government-in-exile whose priority will be to elbow out Bashar Al Assad’s regime.
Said said in remarks to Aljazeera.net that perceptions that the SNC is in touch with the Assad government on the sly and has the tendency to hold tacit negotiations with it are baseless.
“The revolutionaries don’t need any direct external intervention in their fight against the Assad regime,” he said rather emphatically. “What they need is quality weapons to tilt the balance in their favour.”
Meanwhile, wire agencies said that the Doha meet is the first concerted attempt to meld opposition groups based abroad and align them with rebels fighting in Syria.
The Peninsula
