President Obama’s former top adviser on Middle East policy says the time has come for the administration to rethink its demand that Syrian President Bashar Assad must step down – a stipulation that has underpinned the White House’s approach to Syria’s war for the past four years. Therefore, an worldwide effort that focuses exclusively on defeating ISIS, without resolving the fractures that brought the country to civil war in the first place, will not solve Syria’s problems.
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“President Assad unleashed chemical weapons on his own people, and the death and destruction in Syria is appalling and at unprecedented levels”.
“We have to speak with many actors, this includes Assad, but others as well,” Merkel said in a press conference at the end of the European Union summit.
Which is true primarily because the Western nations that have been backing those rebels keep telling them not to participate.
“Russia’s involvement [in negotiations with Iran over their nuclear program] has been said to be very positive by all of those negotiating that agreement”, she said. Iran is viewed as one of Assad’s strongest allies.
Assad’s public appearance comes at a moment of US uncertainty over Russia’s actions in Syria.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to launch a new initiative for a political solution in Syria during meetings in New York this week, diplomats said.
“Russia’s military build-up complicates the situation”, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told the French daily Le Monde in an interview after talks with his French and German counterparts in Paris on Thursday night. It’s just the latest example of Putin outmanoeuvring Obama, having similarly ignored USA outcries about Russian activities in Ukraine and the Crimea.
At the same time, she said Assad “can’t be part of a solution” but “could play an important role on the way to a search for the solution”.
Iran, which has said it is willing to sit down with rivals to discuss the crisis in Syria, is a staunch ally of Assad that backs the activities in Syria of Lebanese militant group Hizbollah, which has given Assad vital support. Russian Federation is essentially making a stand in Syria in order to indicate that there would be costs in its being ignored in world affairs. “To every fighter on the fire line facing terrorism and the terrorists, the murderers and the criminals…to the martyrs’ families…to our injured heroes…to all of these great people who have entrenched that will in us, as Syrians“.
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Creation of these sanctuaries would produce autonomous zones that would never again have to face the prospect of rule by either Assad or the Islamic State.
