Bombings kill 20 in Syria as peace talks invitations go out

BEIRUT -- Bombings struck a government-run checkpoint in the central Syrian city of Homs on Tuesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding over 100 amid political jockeying ahead of U.N.-backed peace talks scheduled to begin Friday in Geneva.

The office of the U.N. envoy for Syria said it sent invitations for the talks, but with three days to go, the opposition is undecided whether it will attend. One opposition official suggested the Saudi-backed opposition delegation may boycott the talks.

Khawla Mattar, a spokeswoman for Staffan de Mistura, said in Geneva the envoy would not make public the numbers and identities of the invitees until his office gets "feedback from the invited parties" -- a sign of the delicacy of his task.

The talks are meant to start a process to end the conflict that began in 2011 as a largely peaceful uprising against Assad's rule but escalated into war after a harsh state crackdown. The plan calls for cease-fires in parallel to the talks, a new constitution and elections in a year and a half.

The attack in Homs, claimed by the Islamic State group, came as government forces retook a southern town from opposition fighters and other militants. Homs governor Talal Barazi said the checkpoint was hit "first by a car bomb, which was then followed by a suicide bombing."

Syrian state television broadcast footage of the aftermath of the attack, showing cars ablaze and extensive damage to shops and apartments around the site of the explosion in the Zahra neighborhood, which is inhabited mostly by members of President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The district has been a frequent target of bombings in recent months.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group which relies on a network of informants across Syria, quoted witnesses at the scene as saying the first bomber attracted a crowd of security agents by shouting curses about the Homs governor, then blew up his vehicle.

Meanwhile, in southern Syria, government forces seized the town of Sheikh Maskin, culminating an offensive that began in late December to retake the town after seizing the nearby Brigade 82 military base.

Sheikh Maskin lies near the highway connecting Damascus and the Jordanian border, and connects the Syrian capital to Daraa, a border town held by opposition fighters. Its fall is the latest in a string of battlefield successes for Assad's military that have bolstered his hand ahead of the planned peace talks.

The Saudi-backed opposition was meeting Tuesday in Riyadh to make a final decision about whether to attend the talks. The opposition has accused Russia, a key backer of the Syrian government, of trying to "dictate" who from the opposition would participate.

Tensions over who would be invited to the talks, the cause of earlier delays, continued Tuesday.

A senior opposition official suggested the opposition may not travel to Geneva in the absence of confidence-building measures by the government regarding humanitarian issues.

"It is better for the conference not to start rather than start and fail," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give press statements while the opposition meeting was still underway.

Russia has argued against Turkey's demand to keep a leading Kurdish group out of the talks, and said it expects the U.N. envoy to resist "blackmail" by Turkey and others, reflecting the sharp differences that remain.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized at a press conference in Moscow that the main Syrian Kurdish group -- the Democratic Union Party, or PYD -- plays an important role in fighting the Islamic State group and is an essential part of any political settlement in Syria.

Turkey sees the PYD and its YPG militia as branches of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known as the PKK, which has waged a long insurgency against Ankara and is branded a terrorist group by Turkey and several Western countries.