U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday he had invited Iran to attend the first day of Syria peace talks on January 22 in Montreux, Switzerland and that Tehran had pledged to play a "positive and constructive role" if it was asked to participate. More than 100,000 people have been killed and over 2 million have fled Syria during the nearly three-year civil war. Western and Gulf Arab nations say they have been reluctant to the support the idea of Iran participating at all because it is supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad militarily and has never backed a plan for a political transition in Syria agreed at an international conference in Geneva in June 2012. Ban said he had spoken at length with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in recent days and that he believed Tehran supported for the Geneva 2012 plan.
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January 20th, 2014
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