DUBLIN, Ireland — Diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s civil war moved forward yesterday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joining Russia’s foreign minister and the UN peace envoy to the Arab country for extraordinary three-way talks.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said intelligence reports raise fears that an increasingly desperate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is considering using his chemical-weapons arsenal, which the United States and Russia agree is unacceptable.
It was unclear whether he might target rebels within Syria or bordering countries, but growing concern over such a scenario was clearly adding urgency to discussions an ocean away in Ireland’s capital.
On the sidelines of a human-rights conference, Clinton gathered with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and mediator Lakhdar Brahimi for about 40 minutes to look for a strategy the international community could rally around to end Syria’s 21-month civil war.
“We have talked a little bit about how we can work out, hopefully, a process that will get Syria back from the brink,” Brahimi said after the meeting ended.
Brahimi The experienced Algerian diplomat, representing the global body and the Arab League, said he would put together a peace process based on a political-transition strategy the United States and Russia agreed on in Geneva in June. At that time, the process quickly became bogged down over how the international community might enforce its conditions.
“We haven’t taken any sensational decisions,” Brahimi said. “But I think we have agreed that the situation is bad and we have agreed that we must continue to work together to see how we can find creative ways of bringing this problem under control and, hopefully, starting to solve it.”