MONTREUX (SWITZERLAND) (TIP): Peace talks intended to carve a path out of Syria‘s civil war got off to a rocky start on January 23 as a bitter clash over President Bashar Assad’s future threatened to collapse the negotiations even before they really begin. The dispute over Assad cast a pall over the start of an international peace conference that aims to map out a transitional government and ultimately a democratic election for the wartorn Middle East nation. While diplomats sparred against a pristine Alpine backdrop, Syrian forces and opposition fighters clashed across a wide area from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to Daraa in the south, where the uprising against Assad began three years ago, activists and state media said.

The US and the Syrian opposition opened the conference by saying the Syrian leader lost his legitimacy when he crushed a once-peaceful protest movement. In a strong riposte, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem countered that terrorists and foreign meddling had ripped his country apart. He refused to give up the podium despite requests from the UN chief. “You live in New York. I live in Syria,” he angrily told UN chief Ban Ki-moon. “I have the right to give the Syrian version here in this forum.

After three years of suffering, this is my right.” Less than three hours into the peace talks in the Swiss city of Montreux, the two sides seemed impossibly far apart. “We really need to deal with reality,” said US secretary of state John Kerry. “There is no way — no way possible in the imagination — that the man who has led the brutal response to his own people could regain the legitimacy to govern. One man and those who have supported him can no longer hold an entire nation and a region hostage.”

The Syrian opposition leader, —Amhad al- Jarba of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition — had wavered up to the last-minute on whether to attend peace talks that have been largely opposed by rebel brigades in Syria. He insisted Wednesday that the whole point of the peace conference was to create a transitional government without Assad. Al-Moallem insisted that no one except Syrians could remove Assad. He also accused the West and neighboring countries — notably Saudi Arabia, which he did not name — of funneling money, weapons and foreign fighters to the rebellion. “The West claims to fight terrorism publically while they feed it secretly,” he said.

“Syrians here in this hall participated in all that has happened, they implemented, facilitated the bloodshed and all at the expense of the Syrian people they claim to represent.” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki later criticized the Syrian government’s rhetoric as “inflammatory” and al-Jarba’s chief of staff called it a false distraction. “All of what they say is lies,” Jarba’s chief of staff, Monzer Akbik, told The Associated Press.

“The Syrian people are fighting al-Qaida in the North and it was the regime that brought al- Qaida in.” At least 130,000 people have been killing in the fighting that began with a peaceful uprising in March 2011 against Assad’s rule, according to activists, who are the only ones still keeping count after the UN abandoned its efforts. The fighting has forced millions of Syrians to flee their homes.