DAMASCUS — The commander of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) said on Tuesday, Nov. 26, his group would shun a planned peace conference in Switzerland in January and would pursue its fight to topple President Bashar al-Assad regardless.

General Salim Idriss’s stance highlights how hard it will be for international mediators to get Syria’s warring and divided parties to the negotiating table in Geneva.

The “Geneva 2” conference will convene on January 22, the United Nations said on Monday, with the stated goal of agreeing a transitional government to end a 2-1/2-year-old conflict that has killed well over 100,000 people and displaced millions more.

“Conditions are not suitable for running the Geneva 2 talks at the given date and we, as a military and revolutionary force, will not participate in the conference,” Idriss said.

“We will not stop combat at all during the Geneva conference or after it, and what concerns us is getting needed weapons for our fighters,” he told Al Jazeera television.

The diplomacy has brought no let-up in the violence.

A suicide bomber killed 15 people and wounded more than 30, on Tuesday, at a bus station in a suburb west of Damascus, state media said.

Heavy fighting has raged for days outside the capital Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, with rebels reporting small gains after months of losing momentum to Assad’s forces.

Assad, emboldened by a string of military successes, has said he will send delegates to the Geneva talks but will accept no preconditions and will put any agreement to a referendum – a vote which opposition figures say will be rigged against them.

The Western-backed FSA is an umbrella group encompassing many rebel units, but opposition sources and analysts say its influence has already been eroded by Islamist groups which are forging alliances among the most powerful rebel forces.

The Syrian army recaptured the strategic town of Deir Attiyeh Thursday, less than a week after losing it, taking the advantage in its bid to crush rebels just north of Damascus.

The takeover of Deir Attiyeh, on the Damascus-Homs highway, comes two weeks into an army offensive in the Qalamoun region, important to the regime for its proximity to the capital and the rebels as it serves as their rear base near the border with Lebanon.

“Our heroic army has taken total control of the town of Deir Attiyeh in Damascus province after it crushed the terrorists’ last enclaves there,” said state television, citing a military source.

A high-ranking security official in Damascus confirmed the report, adding that “operations to expel the terrorists from nearby areas are ongoing.”

On Friday last week, hundreds of jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front, as well as other rebels, took control of Deir Attiyeh, according to a monitoring group.

Most of the rebels who had taken up positions in Deir Attiyeh were “crushed” and the town had been “cleansed,” the security official said on condition of anonymity.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the army was now in “near-total control” of Deir Attiyeh, though gunfire could still be heard.

A security source said regime loyalists also entered the nearby town of Nabuk.

Government to participate but 

rules out surrendering power 

Syria said on Wednesday, Oct. 27, that Western countries, which demand that Assad step down, should either stop dreaming or forget attending peace talks in January.

Responding to an announcement that the long-delayed “Geneva 2” conference aimed at resolving Syria’s civil war will be held on January 22, it said Assad’s government would take part in the meeting but reiterated that it had no plans to surrender power.

The statement highlighted the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between opposing sides in the 2-1/2 year conflict.

“The age of colonialism, with the installation and toppling of governments, is over. They must wake from their dreams,” a foreign ministry source said on Wednesday in response to French and British calls for Assad to step aside.

“If they insist on these delusions, there is no need for them to attend Geneva 2,” said the source in a statement carried by the official SANA news agency.

“Our people will not allow anyone to steal their right to choose their future and their leadership,” the source said. “The official Syrian delegation is not going to Geneva to surrender power.”

The opposition has been badly divided over Geneva 2. The Syrian National Coalition, a grouping also supported by the West, has announced conditional readiness to join the talks, despite objections from fighters and activists inside Syria.

Opposition figures in Istanbul said some coalition members were in talks in Geneva with the U.N. envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, as well with officials from the United States and Russia, the main architects of the planned peace conference.

The coalition spokesman, Khaled Saleh, said it would meet again on December 15 to decide whether to attend the talks.

He said the group wanted to know whether Assad and foreign powers would meet its demands for the creation of humanitarian aid corridors and the release of political prisoners.

“If they made sure the conditions for Geneva were there, we could have held Geneva tomorrow. Instead of focusing on the success of Geneva, they were focusing on the date,” he said.

In the opposition-held suburbs of Damascus, activists said rebels were advancing slowly near the international airport road against heavy resistance from Assad’s forces backed by Hezbollah fighters and the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigades, a militia made up of foreign Shi’a militants.

Foreign Sunni militants, many of them linked to al-Qaeda, are also fighting alongside Assad’s opponents.

Rebels east of Damascus are struggling to break a blockade that has cut off most food, supplies and weapons for six months.

In northern Syria, they have been fighting an offensive by Assad’s forces in a previously rebel-dominated region. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group, said rebels had seized several villages but had been unable to block a highway to prevent a further army advance.

After so much bloodshed, each side in Syria sees the war as a struggle for survival, but neither has gained military supremacy, giving mediators a chance to argue for compromise.

The involvement of neighboring powers in the conflict risks prolonging the violence and spreading it beyond Syria’s borders.

Iran supports Assad. Sunni Saudi Arabia is backing the rebels.

It is unclear if Iran, which agreed a preliminary nuclear deal with world powers on Sunday, will attend the Syria talks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Tuesday his country would take part if invited, adding that it would in any event work for a peaceful solution.

“Participation of Iran in Geneva 2 is in our view an important contribution to the resolution of the problem. We have said all along that if Iran is invited, we will participate without any preconditions,” Zarif told Iran’s Press TV.

Western powers have questioned whether Iran should be invited because it has yet to endorse the outcome of a 2012 Geneva conference which forms the basis for the January talks.

This says a future Syrian government must be formed by “mutual consent” of the authorities and the opposition, a stance the United States says means Assad cannot stay in power.  

-TAAN, Reuters, MEO