U.N. Chief: Brahimi to Meet Assad in Syria

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that the new U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will meet Syrian President Bashar Assad when he travels to the conflict-ravaged country.

"Special representative Brahimi is soon going to have a meeting with Syrian authorities including president Assad, and he has already been engaged with the key stakeholders," Ban told a news conference in Bern, without providing more details about the highly anticipated visit.

Brahimi, replacing former U.N. chief Kofi Annan who quit over divisions in the U.N. Security Council on the deadly violence that has gripped Syria for nearly 18 months, arrived in Cairo on Sunday.

The envoy, who has acknowledged he is on a "very difficult mission", said Monday he would travel to Damascus in a few days to meet with Syrian officials, but had been unclear on whether he would be able to meet Assad himself.

Expectations that Brahimi will have any more success than Annan did are low, however, and he himself warned Monday: "We cannot expect miracles."

Ban meanwhile acknowledged Tuesday that he understood that many are frustrated in the face of the U.N. Security Council's apparent paralysis in dealing with the spiraling crisis in Syria.

But "while we may be frustrated and troubled by not being able to address the situation in Syria, which has reached intolerable circumstances," he said, "we should not be overly pessimistic about the strength and the commitment of the international community, especially the international organizations."

More than 27,000 people have been killed since the Syrian conflict erupted in March last year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The United Nations puts the death toll at 20,000.