THE devil will be in the detail of the settlement reached by the Syrian opposition groups whose marathon negotiations toward finding a unified voice, finally finished on Sunday, in the Qatari capital, Doha. What is clear is that the Syrian National Council (SNC), which some opposition groups had refused to join, has lost its monopoly in seeking, and “seeking” is the operative word, to represent the diverse political and military groups that are dedicated to the overthrow of the Assad regime. It has now been agreed that there should be a new 60-member council, to be known as the National Coalition for Opposition Forces and the Syrian Revolution (NCOFSR) headed by a cleric, Moaz Al-Khatib, with long-standing dissident Riad Seif and female activist Suhair Atassi as his deputies. The idea is that the NCOFSR should establish a transitional government, which will administer those parts of Syria which are now in the hands of the Free Syrian Army. The body will also form a military council to coordinate the campaign against Assad's forces. The great concern has to be that the Doha gathering broke up without nailing the final arrangements of precisely who the 60 members of the NCOFSR will be, and, once that is sorted out, how the members of the transitional government will be chosen. The SNC reportedly fought tooth and nail against what it saw as a dilution of its position. Rather than accepting their responsibility for its failure to provide a unity platform, some SNC members insisted they had been sabotaged by radical groups that refused to join it. This was not a good opening position for the rebuilding of a single political front. It is still unclear what proportion of the NCOFSR will be made up of SNC members. There was much talk after the negotiations ended of “important milestones” and “political breakthroughs”, but it should be noted that most of this came from non-Syrian sources. Indeed the Arab League, the United States and the French and the British appear to have been doing a deal of arm-twisting behind the scenes in Doha. By no means all Syrian opposition delegates came away from the talks in the same upbeat mood. One diplomat close to the negotiations noted that in an ideal world, the SNC would have agreed to dissolve itself and allow itself to be reconstituted into the new body. By keeping its old, discredited identity, there was still a danger of discord. Indeed, the fact that there has yet to be a clear settlement of who will make up the new NCOFSR, let alone the transitional government, suggests that difficult times lie ahead. Meanwhile the fighting continues, with the death toll in Syria now passing 37,000. It should not be forgotten that one reason for the failure of July's opposition talks in Cairo was that the FSA refused to send a formal delegation. The rift between those who are doing the fighting and dying and those who are doing the politicking and arguing has been growing ever since. The risk surely has to be that as and when the new organization's military council is established, none of the fighters on the ground will take a blind bit of notice of it and may, by extension, be leery of allowing a transitional government to administer territory they have captured and now rule themselves.
