UN, Russia set for meet without US

The UN's Syria envoy yesterday said that he will hold talks with Russian officials next week but without the US present after previous plans for a trilateral meeting were "postponed".

UN peace mediator Staffan de Mistura said his meeting with Russia's deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov is set for Monday in Geneva.

"The trilateral meeting is not off the table, it is simply being postponed", de Mistura told reporters.

Asked why US President Donald Trump's representatives decided to skip the meeting, de Mistura said: "you should ask them, frankly."

He also restated his desire to convene a sixth round of UN-backed talks involving Syrian rivals next month.The previous rounds have failed to produce concrete results.

Meanwhile, hundreds of frightened Syrian evacuees from two besieged government-held towns were stuck at a rebel-held transit point yesterday where dozens of their fellow townspeople were killed in a weekend bombing.

The 3,000 evacuees, who had left their homes at dawn on Wednesday, spent the night in buses in a marshalling area in Rashidin, west of government-held second city Aleppo, awaiting onward transport to safety.Some 300 evacuees from rebel-held towns were similarly held up at a staging point at Ramussa in government-held territory.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the delay was the result of 11th-hour rebel demands for the release of prisoners held by the government.