BEIRUT: The United States will have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a political transition in Syria and is exploring ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks, US Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in an interview.
Washington has long insisted that Assad must be replaced through a negotiated, political transition, but failure to overthrow his government by military means appears to have softened the West’s stance towards Damascus.
In the interview broadcast on Sunday, Kerry did not repeat the standard US line that Assad had lost all legitimacy and had to go. Syria’s civil war is now into its fifth year, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of Syrians displaced.
“We have to negotiate in the end,” Kerry said. “We’ve always been willing to negotiate in the context of the Geneva I process,” he added, referring to a 2012 conference which called for a negotiated transition to end the conflict.
Kerry said the United States and other countries, which he did not name, were exploring ways to reignite the diplomatic process to end the conflict in Syria.
“What we’re pushing for is to get him [Assad] to come and do that, and it may require that there be increased pressure on him of various kinds in order to do that,” the secretary of state said.
“We’ve made it very clear to people that we are looking at increased steps that can help bring about that pressure,” he added.
The United States led efforts to convene UN-backed peace talks in Geneva last year between Western-backed Syrian opposition representatives and a government delegation. The talks collapsed after two rounds and no fresh talks have been scheduled.
Russia convened some opposition and government figures in January for talks on the crisis but they yielded little progress and the main opposition coalition boycotted them.
“To get the Assad regime to negotiate, we’re going to have to make it clear to him that there is a determination by everybody to seek that political outcome and change his calculation about negotiating,” Kerry said.
“That’s under way right now. And I am convinced that, with the efforts of our allies and others, there will be increased pressure on Assad.”
Syria sank into civil war following ‘Arab Spring’ protests in March 2011. The revolt spiraled into an armed insurgency which was backed by West and its Arab allies as they wanted to unseat Assad, Iran’s key Arab ally. The armed insurrection has since given rise to ISIL and other hard-liners who now threaten the Washington’s regional allies.
Assad seems more likely to survive the Syrian crisis than at any point since it began. Iran’s support for Assad is as solid as ever, with Russia showing no sign of abandoning him.
US-led forces started air strikes against ISIL in Syria and Iraq in the summer. Washington has said the campaign in Syria is not coordinated with the Syrian military, which also views the group as its enemy.
The war has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced close to half the population, according to the United Nations. Damascus accuses its Western and Gulf Arab opponents of seeking to destroy the country by providing aid to an insurgency now dominated by jihadists, who also pose a threat to the West.
In the meantime, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan has said the US does not want to see Syrian President Assad’s government collapse and create a vacuum for the terrorist ISIL to take over.
Speaking at an event on Friday at the New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Brennan said, “What we don’t want to do is to allow those extremist elements,” including ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda elements within Syria, to seize power from a collapsed regime.
The last thing we want to do is to allow them to march into Damascus, said Brennan. His remarks once again underscored a major policy shift in Washington.
Mike Harris, an American journalist says if the United States wants to defeat the ISIL, it must negotiate with the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Negotiating with the Syrian government, particularly with President Bashar al-Assad is fundamental to the US having success with ISIS (ISIL),” said Mike Harris, a financial editor at Veterans Today.
“Its time to normalize relationships with Syria, as well as with the other countries in the region, mainly Iran,” he added.
We have to stop this causing wars in order to [make profit],” Harris told Press TV on Sunday. “Elements of our government and other governments cause wars in order to earn profit from them and to gain material support for terrorism.”
Its time for the world [to] unite and realize that theres an organized group that is behind the state-sponsored terrorism, and those are the ones who are providing material support to terrorism, he stated.
When we look at the theft of oil from Syria, the theft of oil from Iraq, the theft of artifacts, every time that commodity of oil and artifacts are stolen, someone is transporting them someone is buying [them], some bank is settling the accounts, he said.
We have to realize [that] all of the people who are involved into this are also supporting terrorism, he noted. And they too must be liable to civil and criminal penalties for their support. If we cut off the money to terrorism, the terrorism will go away.
And it is vitally important that the elected US government negotiate with Syria, negotiate with President Bashar al-Assad in order to come with a cogent strategy to stop this lawlessness, he concluded.
Kerrys latest remarks are in contrast with the comments made by him earlier this month in Saudi Arabia where he said that military pressure might be necessary to oust Assad.
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