LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- The United States, Russia and seven other would-be Syria mediators ended a 4½-hour meeting Saturday without agreement or concrete steps to match what America's top diplomat described as the urgent crisis in the city of Aleppo.
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Instead, the envoys said only that new ideas were proposed and more discussions were planned.
The result from the gathering in Switzerland highlighted the world's inability so far to find a peaceful path out of a conflict that has killed as many as 500,000 people, contributed to Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II and created instability that the Islamic State group has exploited.
With the Syrian and Russian governments pressing an offensive against rebel-held parts of Aleppo, no one predicted a breakthrough. Yet after last month's collapse of a cease-fire and even U.S. accusations of Russian war crimes, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry portrayed the result as "exactly what we wanted."
"Nobody wants to do this in a sloppy way," Kerry said of his new diplomatic effort, no longer between just Washington and Moscow but designed to include all the major international players in Syria's civil war. Saturday's talks included top envoys from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. The U.N. special envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, also was present.
Kerry said the discussion was driven by the "urgency of Aleppo, the urgency of trying to find something that works other than military action." Ministers offered suggestions that "really might be able to shape some different approaches," he said, without going into detail.
No official news conference or joint statement followed the meeting. Kerry said contacts, but not necessarily a meeting, would start this week. He was to head to London for talks with key allies today.
Days of deadly airstrikes in Aleppo prompted Kerry last month to end bilateral U.S.-Russian engagement on Syria, including discussions over a proposed military alliance against the Islamic State and al-Qaida-linked militants in Syria. Last week he accused Russia of war crimes for targeting hospitals and civilian infrastructure in Syria.
In Germany on Saturday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said some actions in Syria have come "very close to war crimes," calling the bombing of hospitals and underground facilities in Aleppo "inhuman."
Merkel, speaking at a conference of her conservative Union bloc's youth wing in the western German city of Paderborn, did not explicitly attribute responsibility for those actions in Syria, but her condemnation of them was strong.
"I think we are very close to war crimes," she said. "Whether there are war crimes, the International Court of Justice decides."
Nevertheless, Kerry reunited with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the lakeside Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne, speaking with the Russian for almost 40 minutes before the larger gathering. Kerry also met with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir before the larger meeting.
"There are a few ideas we discussed today in this circle of countries that can influence the situation," Lavrov told Russian news agencies. "We agreed to continue contacts in the next few days aiming at agreements that could advance the settlement. We spoke clearly in favor of a quick launch of a political process."
little optimism
Both sides had played down prospects of a breakthrough before the talks began.
Mark Toner, the deputy spokesman for the State Department, said Friday that the broad goal of the meeting is to achieve at least a temporary truce so humanitarian aid can be delivered and talks can resume on getting peace negotiations between the opposition and the Syrian government "up and running."
But another U.S. official said no "major announcements" were expected at the end of the meeting and portrayed it as the next step after a pause in which the fighting became fiercer and little diplomacy was done.
"We've asked countries to come, having done some thinking about a realistic way forward, given the differences represented in the room," the official said, speaking to reporters anonymously to address the probably modest outcome of the talks.
Lavrov had said Russia would propose "concrete steps" for implementing U.N. Security Council resolutions already agreed to by Moscow and Washington. During a visit Friday to Armenia, he told reporters that the main aims were the "separation of terrorists from the so-called moderate opposition" and "humanitarian-aid deliveries." But Lavrov said he didn't expect any steps proposed by the West to meet Russia's bottom line.
In a sign that Turkey and Russia have repaired relations since last year's Turkish downing of a Russian plane, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu appeared to endorse Russia's position on the significance of U.S. and Turkish-backed opposition forces separating themselves from al-Qaida-linked militants. Russia has said it wants a cease-fire but cannot do so while extremists continue to embed themselves with other rebel groups to take advantage of lulls in the fighting.
"There was no resolution on the cease-fire," Cavusoglu acknowledged. He said talks would continue.
Despite fiercely criticizing Syria and Russia, the United States doesn't seem to have an answer.
President Barack Obama and the Pentagon have made clear their opposition to any U.S. military strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad's military.
The U.S. is examining ways to provide more weapons to opposition fighters through allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, according to a U.S. administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Given the collapse of several cease-fires in Syria in recent months, Washington doubts Moscow's seriousness. And with rebel-held Aleppo poised to fall, there is deep skepticism that the Syrian and Russian governments want to stop the fighting just yet.
more airstrikes
Residents of opposition-held eastern Aleppo have faced daily violence as Assad's government seeks to take full control of the country's largest city. The United Nations says stockpiles of food, fuel and medicine are running desperately low.
On Saturday, Syrian and Russian airstrikes hit several rebel-held neighborhoods during clashes on the front lines in Syria's largest city and onetime commercial center, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective.
The Observatory said government forces and their allies captured several buildings on the front lines. State TV said Syrian troops blew up a tunnel near Aleppo's famous Citadel, killing dozens of opposition fighters.
Also, opposition fighters backed by Turkish airstrikes launched an offensive to try to capture Dabiq from the Islamic State, which confers special status to the northern Syrian town in its ideology and propaganda.
The Observatory said the attack was preceded by intense shelling. It said Turkey-backed opposition fighters captured three nearby villages, encircling Dabiq and cutting off all supply routes.
Turkey sent troops and tanks into northern Syria in August to help opposition forces recapture Islamic State strongholds and halt the advance of a U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia, which Ankara views as an extension of Turkey's outlawed Kurdish separatists.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking in Rize on the Black Sea coast, said "we entered Jarablus, and then al-Rai, and now we are moving where? To Dabiq. We will declare a terror-free safe zone of [about 2,000 square miles]." He was referring to areas in Syria already captured by Turkish troops and Turkey-backed opposition forces.
Erdogan suggested that some of the nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey could return to newly liberated areas of their country. "They can go to their own lands, we can let them live there safely," he said. "That's the step we will take. We have given our proposal to coalition powers and we are moving together."
The town of Dabiq is central to Islamic State propaganda. The extremists, citing ancient prophecy, believe Dabiq will be the scene of an apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Islam. The group named its online magazine after the town, which it has occupied since August 2014.
Information for this article was contributed by Bradley Klapper, Jamey Keaten, Bassem Mroue, Albert Aji, Zeynep Bilginsoy and staff members of The Associated Press; by Henry Meyer, Donna Abu-Nasr, Stepan Kravchenko, Ilya Arkhipov and Nick Wadhams of Bloomberg News; by Carol Morello of The Washington Post; and by Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times.
A Section on 10/16/2016