UN envoy to Syria tells world to listen to Russia to end civil war
The UN special peace envoy to Syria has urged the international community to take advice from Russia to resolve the four-year-long civil war that has claimed 210,000 lives and left 1.5 million Syrians with injuries and disabilities.
“Russia has influence on Damascus, and it’s very important
that they get involved," Staffan de Mistura, who was
challenged by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last Thursday
to relaunch the failed political peace process in Syria, told The
Independent.
“The two countries’ relationship goes back to the time when
Bashar al-Assad’s father was in power. Therefore the Russians do
have a knowledge of the system and the way they think,” the
Swedish-Italian diplomat said.
The civil war in Syria began in 2011, when the US-backed
opposition began an armed rebellion against President Bashar
Assad’s government during the Arab Spring. By 2013, large
portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq had fallen under
control of militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS/ISIL, now known as Islamic State). While declaring the need
to fight ISIS, Washington has continued to demand the overthrow
of Assad in favor of “moderate opposition.”
READ MORE: Assad: Anti-ISIS coalition doesn’t want to get rid of Islamic State completely
The US has been supporting the Syrian rebels, who insist that the
Syrian president should be ousted. Meanwhile, Russia has used its
veto on three occasions since the outbreak of the conflict to
prevent the UN Security Council from taking punitive actions
against Bashar Assad. In January, Russia and the US held the
Geneva-2 peace talks between Assad’s government and the Syrian
opposition. No agreement was reached after two rounds of
negotiations, however.
Last September, the US-led coalition started airstrikes in Syria
as a part of a joint effort to battle Islamic State militants,
who had seized large swathes of land in north Syria and Iraq.
Assad repeatedly pointed out that strikes are an illegal
intervention, saying they are unauthorized by a UN Security
Council resolution and thus violate the sovereignty of Syria.
The Syrian president told Russian media in late March that the
West does not have a political solution to the crisis in Syria,
and claimed it is only interested in destroying his government.
“They want to turn us into puppets. I do not think that the
West has a political solution. It does not want one. When I say
the West, I am primarily referring to the US, France, the UK.
Other countries are secondary,” Mr Assad stated, adding that
to halt the ongoing armed conflict in Syria countries like
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and some European states should
first and foremost stop arming the terrorists. He told
journalists that the Syrian Air Force, which is relatively small
in comparison to the US-led coalition, conducts in a single day
many times the number of the airstrikes conducted by a coalition
that includes 60 countries. “This doesn’t make sense. This
shows the lack of seriousness,” Syria’s president said.
“They don’t want to get rid of ISIS completely,” he
added.
Syria has meanwhile turned into a hotbed for international
terrorism. Assad's government has been long sounding the alarm,
saying foreign fighters were increasingly present among the rebel
forces for years, but neighbors like Turkey chose to turn a blind
eye to the stream of extremists traveling across the border.
Experts told UN Security Council in March that up to 22,000
foreign fighters from around 100 countries went to Syria and Iraq
to join various radical groups. The area has turned into a global
training ground for extremists. “For the thousands of
[foreign fighters] who traveled to the Syrian Arab Republic and
Iraq ... they live and work in a veritable 'international
finishing school' for extremists as it was in the case in
Afghanistan during the 1990s,” the experts wrote in their
report, Reuters reported.
Staffan de Mistura told RT in March that it would be far easier
to address the issue of ISIS in Syria if the opposition and the
government negotiated a ceasefire.
"Every conflict needs to start with some type of discussion, among the Syrian people in this particular case. We have a new factor which is called Daesh/ISIS. And I’m sure I believe that this is certainly increasing the urgency of addressing the conflict in Syria. Daesh has been taking advantage of the fact that there is a weak environment in Syria and a conflict which has been going on for the last four years," he said.
