BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lakhdar Brahimi, the special envoy seeking an end to the Syria crisis, held an urgent meeting with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Monday as new signs emerged that Russia, Mr. Assad’s most important foreign backer, was moving forward with plans to evacuate Russian diplomats and other expatriates.
Sana/European Pressphoto Agency
Syria's Arab News Agency, SANA, provided a photograph of President Bashar al-Assad meeting with the international envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on Monday.
The New York Times
A Syrian warplane was reported to have conducted airstrikes that killed dozens of people in Hilfaya, according to antigovernment activists in the area.
Mr. Brahimi, the Algerian statesman who has been the special Syria representative for the United Nations and Arab League for three months, did not specify the substance or tone of his discussion with Mr. Assad, describing it only in general terms in brief remarks afterward.
“The president expressed his view regarding the current situation, and I briefed him on the meetings I had in several capitals with officials from different countries inside and outside the region,” Mr. Brahimi told reporters, according to an account posted on the United Nations’ Web site. “I also told him about the steps that, in my view, need to be taken to help the Syrian people find a way out of this crisis.”
But one member of Syria’s political opposition who said he had spoken with Mr. Brahimi’s aides said the envoy had intended to advocate a plan for a negotiated solution first proposed in June. The opposition member, Mohamed Sarmini, said the proposal would temporarily leave Mr. Assad in power, but curb his authority — an arrangement that some members of the opposition had previously rejected as inadequate.
Another prominent opposition member, who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks, said he understood that Mr. Brahimi had been intending to deliver a “final proposal” to Mr. Assad to leave with members of his intelligence and security services.
Mr. Brahimi was scheduled to meet with opposition members in Damascus on Tuesday, according to Hassan Abdel Azim, a longtime domestic dissident who took a favorable view of the envoy’s visit.
“We are going to listen first to his proposals,” he said. “We support the Brahimi initiative, and we don’t say it has failed at all.”
The envoy arrived on Sunday as new violence gripped the country, particularly in west-central Syria, where rebel groups are trying to capture territory around the strategic city of Hama. Dozens of people were killed Sunday when a Syrian warplane dropped bombs on a bakery on the town of Halfaya, killing at least 58 people — all but three of them men — according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an antigovernment group based in London that maintains a network of contacts inside Syria.
In the signs of the growing perils facing civilians in Hama Province, a jihadist rebel brigade, the Nusra Front, along with other rebel groups, stormed parts of Maan village, where many of the residents belong to the minority Alawite sect, according to the Syrian Observatory. In recent days, some rebel groups have threatened to retaliate against Christian and Alawite villages where government forces have taken up positions.
Top Russian diplomats said that Mr. Brahimi, perhaps trying to broker a deal that would help ease out Mr. Assad, may visit Russia as soon as this week. Russian officials have sought to distance themselves from Mr. Assad in recent weeks as the nearly two-year conflict in Syria has worsened, although they still strongly oppose military intervention in favor of a negotiated transition. Some Russian expatriates working in Syria were abducted this month.
Russian security officials were quoted in Monday’s edition of Kommersant, a Russian daily newspaper, as saying that diplomats in Damascus would be evacuated with the help of special forces, if necessary. The authorities are also prepared to dispatch 100 officers from a special armed unit of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, called “Screen,” which was last used to evacuate Russian diplomats from Baghdad in 2003. The newspaper quoted an intelligence source saying the officers were “ready for a transfer to Damascus, however, the order from above has not been given.”
Ruslan R. Aliyev, an analyst with the Center for the Analysis of Strategy and Technologies, a defense research group based in Moscow, said renewed discussion of evacuations by Russia’s Foreign Ministry reflected what he described as Moscow’s deeply pessimistic prognosis for the region..
As Envoy Meets Syria’s Assad, Russia Signals New Pessimism
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