UN envoy to head up Syria post-war constitution commission

United Nations Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura will head up a new commission due to be set up at a peace conference in Russia this week to draft a new constitution for post-war Syria.

Delegates arrived on Monday for the first Syria peace congress in Russia, but expectations for the dialogue were tempered after the war-torn country's main opposition group said it would boycott the event.

Regime-backer Russia is hosting a two-day Syrian Congress of National Dialogue in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Moscow has invited 1,600 people to the talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as part of a broader push to consolidate its influence in the region and start hammering out a path to a political solution to end the bloody conflict.

Only a fraction of the invitees are set to participate in the event, however, according to a list of participants seen by AFP which has about 350 people on it.

Two days of separate UN-backed talks in Vienna last week ended without any sign that the opposing sides had met face-to-face to discuss the groundwork for a post-war constitution.

The Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC), the country's main opposition group, said following the talks in Vienna on Thursday and Friday that it would not attend the Sochi congress.

The SNC accused President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its Russian backers of continuing to rely on military might - and showing no willingness to enter into honest negotiations - as the war in which more than 340,000 people have already died approaches its seventh year.

The Kremlin has downplayed expectations of the Sochi talks, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling journalists Monday that "breakthroughs in the task of political regulation in Syria are hardly possible."

He added however that under-representation will not "disrupt this congress or undermine its importance," calling the Sochi talks a "very important" step toward peace.

More than three dozen other Syrian rebel groups, including influential Islamists, previously said they would not come to Sochi.

And authorities from Syria's Kurdish autonomous region said Sunday they would not participate because of an ongoing offensive on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin by Turkey, which supports Syrian rebels and is co-sponsoring the congress along with regime-backer Iran.

Western powers have viewed the Russian peace initiative with suspicion, worrying that Moscow is seeking to undermine the UN-backed talks with a view to carving out a settlement that strengthens its ally Assad.

But a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the weekend he would send his Syria peace negotiator Staffan de Mistura to Sochi after receiving assurances the conference would not seek to sideline the organisation's own talks.