“Bashar Al-Assad will leave, have no doubt about it. He will either leave by a political process or he will be removed by force”.
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Asked if Saudi Arabia could send troops to the Turkish border to enter Syria, Cavusoglu said: “This is something that could be desired but there is no plan”.
In October, two people were killed and another two were wounded when a gunman opened fire inside a bank in the city of Jazan.
The short note sent by the Saudi Embassy in London on Friday said the intention was to “protect the worldwide organizations and their employees”, presumably from coalition air strikes.
The Saudi defence ministry last week proposed contributing ground troops as part of an worldwide effort in Syria.
“There will be no Bashar al Assad in the future”, he told newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
With violence still raging on the ground, an ambush by Syrian rebels on pro-regime forces near Damascus this week killed 76 fighters, a monitor said Saturday. Syria is expected to loom large at this year’s event, which also features U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, among others.
He said that military action alone was not enough and there were lots of other activities members of the coalition could be involved with, such as countering Isis messaging, cutting its finances and blocking the flow of foreign fighters.
“The common aim here is for the two countries’ militaries to put forth a joint stance in responding to regional problems”, said the official, adding that Turkey tried to abstain from being seen as a part of the rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran. We have committed no aggression towards Iran.
But Saudi Arabia, he said, has been on the “receiving end” of Iranian aggression. “And they were successful for some time”.
The Saudis won’t send significant numbers – they already stretched with an uphill and losing struggle in Yemen – and they won’t want to be on the front lines, as Saudi troops in Syria would be fighting and killing other Sunnis (and indeed other Saudi Sunnis).
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“The two countries are firmly opposed to the attempts of foreign parties to manipulate the sectarian differences among the brotherly people of Syria for serving their own interests and interfering in the domestic affairs of Syria”, he said. “He added that the authorities in Riyadh had appreciated Russia’s role in finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear programme in 2015 and preventing the use-of-force scenario in the region”, the Russian diplomat went on to say.
