Syria Could Turn Into Somalia if Peace Talks Fail, Says U.N.

[Time]

When Syrian President Bashar Assad met with the UN-Arab League envoy on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of peace talks that might bring an end to a civil war that has killed more than 115,000 Syrians, he made one thing clear. As long as foreign backers supported armed members of the opposition, Assad told former Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus, his regime would not play a part. Never mind that his own forces are equipped with Russian weaponry and funded and assisted in part by Iranian cash, military advisers from Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Hizballah militants. Assad's new red line all but guarantees that the proposed talks will not take place at the end of November as originally planned. In fact, if conditions on the ground in Syria do not change substantially in the coming weeks and months, and international pressure cannot force the warring parties to the table, it's unlikely they will happen at all, say diplomats, analysts and government officials who closely follow the Syrian crisis. If the talks do not take place the risk is that Syria spirals out of control, sucking an already volatile region down with it. Brahimi, a veteran peace negotiator, said in an interview on Monday that the Syrian situation had the potential to be more dramatic, devastating and difficult than Afghanistan, Iraq and even the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, all of which he knows first-hand. "The real danger that threatens this country is a kind of 'Somalization,'" he said, referring to the war-torn and warlord-riven nation in the Horn of Africa that has had no real central government for the past two decades. "More sustained and more profound than what we have seen even in Somalia." It's a grim prognosis. Can it be avoided? For months, the U.S., the U.N. and Russia have struggled to bring the warring parties together to discuss a political solution, a follow up to an earlier conference held in Geneva in June 2012 that resulted in the recognition, by both sides, that continued war