Syria peace envoy eyes 'separate' talks with rival sides in May

The UN peace envoy for Syria wants to kickstart stalled negotiations to end the country's four-year conflict by hosting separate talks with rival sides next month, a spokesman said Tuesday.

Staffan de Mistura will begin "in-depth separate consultations... with Syrian stakeholders as well as with the regional and international actors in order to take stock of their views," UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told reporters.

"This process will start next month... here in Geneva," he said, adding however that "the nature of this process" had yet to be decided and that invitations had not yet been sent out.

De Mistura, a Swedish-Italian career diplomat who was appointed the UN envoy for Syria last July, should provide more details when he addresses the Security Council on April 24, Fawzi said.

It remains unclear whether he will have more success than his predecessors Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi in ending the bloody conflict that in just over four years has killed more than 215,000 people.

In January, de Mistura said the conditions were not yet right to try to launch another round of talks after two massive rounds of negotiations in Switzerland failed.

The second Geneva conference, mediated by Brahimi in early 2014, failed to making any significant headway in ending the war.