The church visit came at around the same time as the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved on Friday a resolution endorsing an global road map for a Syria peace process, a rare show of unity among major powers on a conflict that has claimed more than a quarter million lives.
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President Vladimir Putin says Russian Federation is not using all its military capability in Syria and could do more if necessary.
The resolution calls on the United Nations secretary-general to convene representatives of the Syrian government and opposition “to engage in formal negotiations on a political transition process on an urgent basis, with a target of early January 2016 for the initiation of talks”.
“We see how efficiently our pilots and intelligence agents coordinate their efforts with various kinds of forces – the army, navy and aviation, how they use the most modern weapons”, Russian news agencies quoted Putin as saying. In 2011, Washington imposed sanctions against him in the hope that he would step down.
Britain remains insistent that Assad can remain in place temporarily as part of a transitional administration, but cannot have a long-term role in government.
Attention now turns to Moscow and Riyadh, as Russian Federation pressures Assad’s regime to agree to a ceasefire and Saudi Arabia wrangles the opposition to form a negotiating team.
However, in the 2014 Syrian presidential election Bashar Assad won a landslide victory, receiving 88.7 percent of the votes. “But if 80 percent are hitting opposition rather than hitting Daesh, it’s a challenge, and we’re trying to resolve that, so that we can cooperate”. “The aims of the revolution and the global resolutions, we cling to them, and we will not give them up”, Hijab said.
The council’s adoption of a resolution on Friday backing the plan comes amid world powers’ growing sense that the top priority in Syria should be the defeat of Daesh (the Arabic name for ISIS, which the group dislikes being called), which has exploited the country’s years of chaos and created a base from which it promotes deadly attacks overseas.
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He told reporters that he was “not too optimistic about what has been achieved today”, but added that “a very important step has been made … for Syrians to determine the future of their country”.
