“At a few point…we know there’s going to need to be a conversation with Iran towards the end of a political transition there”, spokesman John Kirby said as the United States sought to organize the next round of talks.
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Washington and Riyadh are part of a US-led coalition that previous year launched an air campaign targeting the Islamic State jihadist group which controls swathes of territory in Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
The next diplomatic round starts Thursday in Vienna, with Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and several top European and Arab diplomats attending.
An alliance of Free Syrian Army-related insurgent groups said on Tuesday it was sceptical about a Russian proposal to help rebels.
The FSA is an armed Syrian opposition faction-considered “moderate opposition” by Western countries-fighting the regular Syrian army remaining loyal to Assad since the beginning of the civil war in 2011.
“There are wide disparities on how Assad goes, when he goes and what happens after”, one senior State Department official said.
Nothing of substance was reported to have come out of Friday’s discussions outside of an agreement to hold another meeting as early as next week.
But most of Russia’s airstrikes have focused on areas where IS militants do not have a major presence, and have enabled a multi-pronged government ground offensive backed by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard against other insurgent groups.
So Syria is a gamble for Russia – logistically, financially, and even in terms of Russian public opinion, which has been much more hesitant about Russian involvement, with overtones of the Afghanistan catastrophe of the 1980s.
The dilemma now is how Assad can be kept as far away as possible from the political process in Syria during the coming period-and whether Moscow is truly capable of offering real guarantees that the current regime will not rise once again, in new form, like a phoenix from the ashes. But in fact it’s Russian Federation that’s acting from a position of weakness. It does not operate with a centralized command structure. The USA and Russian Federation both began air campaigns in the country.
France was not included in four-way talks on Syria between Russian Federation, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey which took place on Friday. There he gave President Vladimir Putin credit for outmaneuvering the USA and said Russian Federation was now in a position to demand attention and respect.
The deployment of special forces shows how serious the Kremlin is about backing Assad – more evidence of Moscow’s deep investment in bailing out a foreign leader’s faltering and possibly doomed regime.
About 30 percent of the more than 240,000 people who have been killed in the Syrian conflict have died since the vote, while the United Nations registered another 1.3 million refugees who fled the country.
Lavrov also spoke by telephone Saturday with Kerry.
“The special forces were pulled out of Ukraine and sent to Syria in a bid to coordinate with Iranian military advisers against rebels”, an anti-Assad rebel commander said.
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It’s been said that the Gulf countries prepare a military response to the Russians. “But I must also consider that he is the head of a state, and that state is a big state, and he feels that state should have a decision-making role in the world”, he said.
