Obama said that for weeks now, Russian Federation has played a helpful role in talks in Vienna that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says could produce a cease-fire within weeks. I am among those who believe that if the external powers that fund and ideologically drive the various conflicts in Syria agree on moves to wind down the war in favour of a peaceful political transition, the parties on the ground would have trouble continuing to fight. A total of 129 people were killed and more than 350 wounded in a series of terror attacks in Paris on November 13. “Maybe it’s getting through to them”, Talbott said. And, most importantly, in the cyber world.
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The diplomat’s sentiments were echoed by other Western and Arab diplomats familiar with the closed-door Vienna talks. Others said it was Washington that pushed a reluctant Riyadh to attend. “For our people! For Paris!”. “But there’s little, if anything, that’s been agreed on Syria”.
In Syria, the Russians quietly took over an airfield in territory controlled by the besieged madman President Bashar Assad.
Obama said it would not be enough to have formal political processes that allow Assad to preserve power. Despite holding diametrically oppoed views on the fate of Assad, Russian Federation and France are set to begin coordinating military and security efforts in the anti-IS fight.
Russian Federation blames the West for the persistent deadlock. However, most of the intelligence services and armed forces failed to act which paved the way for one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the world’s recent history.
A key issue for a ceasefire will be determining which groups fighting Assad will be branded moderate opposition fighters deserving of a seat at the negotiating table and which will be labelled terrorists. That task has been assigned to Jordan.
Most of those strikes targeted strongholds of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or Daesh) group in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, said the official on Friday, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Speaking to reporters in Manila on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Obama questioned Russia’s approach to the crisis in Syria and President Vladimir Putin’s allegiance to President Bashar Assad.
Iran is mostly Shiite and supports Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of that side of the Muslim divide. “We will not accept the idea that terrorist assaults on restaurants and theaters and hotels are the new normal, or that we are powerless to stop them”, Obama said. Suddenly, the global order has been scrambled, drawing the USA, Russian Federation and France together in a possible alliance against the terrorist group. But in a television interview with Italy’s Rai television, Assad said there could be no transition schedule for elections while swathes of Syria remained out of government control.
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And it echoed the language of former prime minister Stephen Harper, who made headlines a year ago after he told Putin at an worldwide meeting: “I guess I’ll shake your hand but I have only one thing to say to you: You need to get out of Ukraine”.
