Syria opposition unveils plan for Assad to leave power after 6 months

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave power after six months of negotiations on a transitional government, opposition negotiator Riyad Hijab said Wednesday in London as he presented his group's road map for peace in Syria.

But he also said his group would reject any deal struck by Russia and the United States on Syria's fate that was very different from its own plan.

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Hijab is the general co-ordinator of the High Negotiations Committee, the main opposition group involved in stalled UN-mediated peace talks in Geneva, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and western powers opposed to Assad's rule.

The proposed process would start with six months of negotiations to set up a transitional administration made up of figures from the opposition, the government and civil society. The transitional body would then run the country for 18 months, at the end of which there would be elections.

"This transitional period will begin with the departure of Bashar al-Assad and his clique, and of course those who have committed crimes against the Syrian people," Hijab said.

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U.S. diplomats, meanwhile, are trying to persuade Russia to take steps toward a true ceasefire in Syria and to nudge Damascus toward a political transition — but news out of Syria is "not encouraging," Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.

"The choice is Russia's to make, and the consequences will be its responsibility," Carter said in an address to students at Cambridge University.

 Intense fighting between Syrian government troops and insurgents in Syria's central Hama province displaced some 100,000 people over eight days between late August and early September, the UN humanitarian agency said.

Earlier this month, insurgents pushed northward in Hama province, surprising government troops and dislodging them from areas they controlled around the provincial capital, also called Hama, including a military base and towns and villages near the highway to Damascus.

The offensive, led by an ultraconservative Islamic group, Jund al-Aqsa, and also involving several factions from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, incurred an intense government bombing campaign that killed dozens of people.

The fighting and the aerial bombardment in Hama sent tens of thousands of people fleeing for safety, creating the latest wave of displacement, part of a pattern that has left nearly half of the Syrian population displaced since the war began in 2011.

In a "flash update " on Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said figures from a camp co-ordination group show nearly half of the displaced from Hama arrived in the neighbouring rebel-held Idlib governorate.

Others fled toward government-controlled Hama city, where four mosques were converted into temporary shelters, OCHA said. Dozens of schools in rural areas of Hama province were also turned into shelters.

A shortage of shelter space means many displaced families are sleeping outdoors in parks in Idlib, the UN agency said.

Most of those fleeing left towns and villages in government areas as the rebels advanced. They feared a violent government response to the insurgent offensive, according to Ahmad al-Ahmad, an activist from Hama. "Wherever the regime is driven out of an area, it ends up destroying it," he said in a text message to The Associated Press.

In at least one airstrike last week, government warplanes struck a van carrying displaced people fleeing Suran, a town north of Hama city, activists said. The government says it is targeting "terrorists."

OCHA said the United Nations has sent an "inter-agency convoy with life-saving supplies to Hama" and was evaluating the humanitarian situation.

An estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of the civil war, now in its sixth year. Of those, 4.8 million are refugees with nearly 7 million displaced internally.