Mediator Lakhdar Brahimi will meet representatives of the warring sides in Syria separately for the first few days of a second round of talks that began on Monday, after the breaking of a local cease-fire set back peace efforts.

With no agreement on which issue should be discussed first, and a case to be made that both depended on the other, Brahimi said he would take them together and discuss them in parallel.

During the second week of talks he plans to expand the scope of the discussion to two other issues: how to manage the continuity of Syria's state institutions and how to handle the process of national dialogue and reconciliation that would arise from any eventual agreement in Geneva.

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