US secretary of state John Kerry has said he would be willing to talk to Syrian president Bashar Assad to stem the nation's violence.
In an interview with CBS News, Mr Kerry said the US is pushing for Mr Assad to seriously discuss a transition strategy to quell the Arab country's four-year civil war.
Mr Kerry said: "We have to negotiate in the end."
While previous efforts saw Assad's government not engage on a concrete plan, Mr Kerry said the US is trying "to get him to come and do that".
He said that may require additional pressure on Assad's Iran-backed government, which is fighting Sunni rebels and Islamic State extremists.
Mr Kerry said there may need to be "increased pressure on him of various kinds" to get talks to happen. "We've made it very clear to people that we are looking at increased steps that can help bring about that pressure," he said.
Representatives of the Syrian government took part in talks in Moscow in January with opposition figures, although the main western-backed opposition group shunned the conference.
The nearly four-year conflict has claimed over 200,000 lives, displaced a third of Syria's population, and nurtured the extremist Islamic State group, which now holds a third of both Syria and neighbouring Iraq in its self-declared caliphate.
Mr Kerry said negotiations are important "because everybody agrees there is no military solution; there's only a political solution. But to get the Assad regime to negotiate, we're going to have to make it clear to him that there is a determination by everybody to seek that political outcome and change his calculation about negotiating. That's under way right now."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article