UN envoy urges “action” on Syria crisis

United Nations Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Tuesday that his visit focused on an action plan for Syria.

At a press conference in Damascus, the envoy said his plan focuses on the real threat of terrorism and the reduction of violence, and that the plan could be the building block for a political solution in Syria, Xinhua reported.

Mistura, who arrived in the country on Saturday, has proposed a “freezing battle” plan to be firstly implemented in the country’s Northern province of Aleppo.

“If the ‘freeze’ works in one place, it could be replicated,” he said. “It’s an incentive toward the political solution”.

Mistura said that he chose Aleppo as the first place to implement his plan because it represents a place where there are high tension between the government and the foreign-backed militants in addition to the presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorists.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was cited by the state news agency SANA as saying that the new initiative was “worth studying”.