Syria rebels head to Geneva peace talks

Syria's main opposition body headed to Switzerland yesterday to demand progress on the dire humanitarian situation before formally joining peace talks, as the starvation death toll in the besieged town of Madaya rose.

The High Negotiations Committee (HNC) late Friday begrudgingly bowed to US and Saudi pressure to at least show up in Geneva to test the waters for joining the biggest push to date to end a five-year-old civil war.

But the body insisted it will not engage in negotiations, even indirectly, with President Bashar al-Assad's regime until UN Security Council resolutions requiring an end to sieges of towns are adhered to.

Highlighting the dire situation, medical charity MSF on Saturday raised the death toll from starvation to at least 46 since December 1 in Madaya, one of more than a dozen Syrian towns blockaded by regime or rebel forces.

On Friday, the scheduled start of a planned six months of talks under an ambitious roadmap set out in Vienna in November, protesters highlighted the plight of ordinary Syrians with "siege soup" of grass and leaves.

A risident of besieged Madaya

The HNC are also pressing for bombardments of civilians to cease.

A source close to the HNC said that the group was sending 17 negotiators and 25 others to the Swiss city. A 16-member delegation representing Assad's government arrived on Friday.

Backed by external powers embroiled in Syria's war, the talks are seeking to end a conflict that has killed more than 260,000 people and fuelled the meteoric rise of the extremist Islamic State group.

But the complexities of the Syrian conflict, involving a tangled web of moderate rebels, Islamist fighters, Kurds, jihadists and regime forces backed by Moscow and Iran, pose a huge challenge to the talks, experts say.

"There is every reason to be pessimistic, and there is no realistic scenario in which a breakthrough would be reached," said Karim Bitar, an analyst at the Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations.

The future of Assad, emboldened by recent territorial gains against rebels thanks to Russian support, in any peace deal remains uncertain.