Iran, Turkey, Egypt, S. Arabia will resume talks on Syria: Iranian official

TEHRAN,April 23(MNA) – Negotiations of a contact group on Syria comprising Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will resume in the near future, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official announced on Sunday. “Egyptian officials will announce the date of the meeting soon,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi had put forward the proposal for the establishment of the contact group to help defuse the Syrian crisis during an emergency Islamic summit held in Mecca on August 14 and 15, 2012. The first meeting of the group was held in Cairo on September 17, 2012. The meeting in Cairo was described as the quartet meeting of the foreign ministers of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, but neither Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal nor any other Saudi Arabian official attended the meeting. Their second meeting was held in New York on September 29, 2012, again in Faisal’s absence. The three ministers also met for the third time in Islamabad on November 21, a day before the summit of the D-8 group of developing countries in the Pakistani capital.