The Russian leader has repeatedly pointed out that the Syrian destiny can not be decided by third countries, Peskov recalled. Western analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin sees an opportunity to both assist Syrian President Dashar al-Assad and boost Russia’s influence in the region at the expense of the US.
Advertisement
“We have to speak with many actors, this includes Assad, but others as well,” Merkel told a press conference after an European Union summit on the migration crisis sparked by the Syrian war.
“Mr. Bashar al-Assad gave us interesting and attractive ideas on the Syrian settlement”, he said.
In a photograph published on his official Twitter account, Assad appears standing in prayer, flanked by Prime Minister Wael Halaqi and Grand Mufti Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun.
Austria’s Foreign Minister, Sebastian Kurz, claimed that Western countries should engage Assad in the joint fight against Islamic State militants. But with four million refugees having fled Syria’s daily atrocities and more waiting in the wings, we must ask how to improve the conditions forcing their flight. But as the refugee crisis and ISIS-inspired terror attacks demonstrate, inaction has not spared the US from the costs of Syria’s conflict.
Bashar al-Assad in those discussions. “We finish the struggle against Islamic State and after think more political and economic reforms in Syria“, she said. So long as he remains in power, the Islamic State draws support and a rationale for its violence.
“The process could possibly be without Assad, or the transitional process could be with him,” he said. In the zero-sum game that Saudi Arabia has been playing with Iran, according to which Riyadh believes that Tehran has no right to be involved in Arab affairs, Assad’s remaining in power would mean loss of face and prestige.
So long as the U.S. remains on the outside looking in on this realization that their rebel allies are getting smaller and smaller, it’s probably going to keep them out of any efforts to help the similarly faltering Assad government fight the groups that are actually growing, primarily ISIS.
Nowhere has this inexorable sequence been more evident than in Syria.
In late August, during his visit to Iran, he admitted that an effective resolution of the Syrian conflict would need to involve negotiations with Assad, as well as the participation of “the two most important and influential players in Syria – Iran and Russian Federation”. Some 7,600 migrants, many of them refugees from the Syrian war, entered Macedonia from Greece between 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) on Wednesday and 6 p.m. on Thursday, an official with the United Nations refugee agency said on the border.
Advertisement
The United States and other Western governments have insisted Assad must eventually go as part of any negotiated deal.
