Khaled Al-Hariri/Reuters
Iranians released by Syrian rebels arrived at a hotel in Damascus on Wednesday.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — More than 2,100 people incarcerated by the Syrian authorities were being released on Wednesday in return for 48 Iranians freed by rebels after five months in captivity, Turkish and Iranian officials said, in what appeared to be the biggest prisoner swap since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria began almost two years ago.
The timing of the exchange, brokered by Turkey and Qatar, was notable, suggesting that negotiations over at least some aspects of the Syrian crisis had not been abandoned three days after Mr. Assad warned that he would not negotiate with his armed adversaries and dismissed calls for him to quit.
Word of the exchange came as allies of Mr. Assad and of his opponents announced that they would continue talking, at least to one another. Lakhdar Brahimi, the special Syria envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, will meet in Geneva on Friday with senior diplomats from Russia, which has opposed efforts to unseat Mr. Assad forcibly, and the United States, which, like Turkey, supports the armed opposition and wants Mr. Assad out.
While Mr. Assad’s unbending stance seemed to make a political solution to Syria’s civil war more remote, his only major foreign allies, Russia and Iran, have their eye on maintaining regional influence in a possible post-Assad future, and an interest in ending the Syrian war with state institutions intact. They have made clear they still favor a settlement. Backers of the opposition, too, worry about chaos in Syria and the region as the fight drags on, and the prisoner exchange suggested that Turkey and Iran, at least, wanted to maintain good relations even as they find themselves on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict.
The prisoner exchange was an enormous relief for Iran, which had long contended the 48 hostages were innocent civilians seized on a religious pilgrimage — not pro-Assad paramilitary fighters as claimed by their rebel captors.
The exchange was announced as Mr. Brahimi, a veteran Algerian diplomat, made his strongest suggestion yet that he would try to pressure Mr. Assad to step aside. Mr. Brahimi’s comments, in interviews with the BBC and Reuters, were his first since Mr. Assad, in a rare public address on Sunday, appeared to reject Mr. Brahimi’s mediation efforts as foreign interference.
“In Syria, in particular, I think that what people are saying is that a family ruling for 40 years is a little bit too long,” Mr. Brahimi told the BBC. Reuters quoted him as saying that Mr. Assad would surely not be a member of any transitional government, envisioned in a peace plan that major powers, including Russia and the United States, had drafted last year in Geneva.
There were other signs that opposing nations were seeking to bridge differences on Syria. Iran’s foreign minister is scheduled to hold talks on Syria on Thursday with President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, who has made Mr. Assad’s removal his central foreign policy goal. A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that even countries that disagree on Syria realize its crisis has no military solution, and should talk more to bring their views closer. And a Turkish deputy foreign minister arrived on Wednesday in Moscow for high-level talks on the crisis, the Turkish news media reported.
Some Middle East political experts speculated that the timing of the prisoner exchange — and the lopsided ratio of roughly 44 people released by Syria for every freed Iranian hostage — reflected both Mr. Assad’s increasing dependence on Iran as well as Iran’s increased pressure on him, possibly out of fear that Syria’s instability may worsen.
“I’m wondering if this is the beginning of Iran starting to cut its losses, pulling out these folks, reducing its presence in the country,” said Mona Yacoubian, a senior adviser on the Middle East at the Stimson Center, a Washington research group.
But some members of the Syrian opposition said the prisoner exchange merely showed that Mr. Assad showed more concern for Tehran than for his own soldiers, far more of whom are being held in captivity by rebels.
“If only we had half a million Iranians,” Adeeb Shishakly, an exile opposition member said on Facebook, “we would have released them for the freedom of 23 million Syrians.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement thanking Turkey and Qatar for helping to secure the release of the Iranian hostages. Iran state television showed a brief clip of them at the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus, grinning, flashing victory signs and holding flowers.
