President Bashar al-Assad has vowed to retake all of Syria, in an interview published hours after a deal was secured for a pause in hostilities in his war-ravaged country.
Speaking to Agence France-Presse in Damascus on Thursday, Assad said his armed forces would try to retake all of Syria “without any hesitation”, but that the involvement of regional players “means that the solution will take a long time and will incur a heavy price”.
He also rejected allegations that his regime had committed war crimes, and said his troops would carry on fighting terrorism while peace talks took place.
Members of Syria’s moderate, western-backed opposition earlier reacted with guarded optimism to a deal agreed in Munich to pause hostilities, but said they did not trust Russia to keep its end of the bargain and halt an intense aerial campaign responsible for the most significant advances by forces loyal to Assad since the start of the civil war.
The advance has so far displaced 51,000 civilians and placed 300,000 more at risk of being placed under siege in Aleppo, according to UN officials, who described the humanitarian situation there as “grotesque”. Late on Thursday the US, Russia and other powers said a cessation of hostilities was to come into force in Syria within a week and humanitarian aid was to be delivered to besieged areas across the country in the next few days.
Rebels questioned the real impact of the deal on the ground, since it excludes the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, which operates in large swaths of the country’s territory.
Issam al-Reis, a spokesman for the Southern Front, a western-backed opposition alliance fighting close to the Jordanian border, said: “We greet this announcement with tentative optimism.”
“However, we are sceptical that Russia will hold to these commitments when its current policy is to indiscriminately bomb all parties in Syria into the dust, in particular civilians and moderate opposition, and with complete impunity, while saying they are bombing terrorists.
“We are waiting for real action, we have now lost faith in words without real action.” Syria’s main opposition group welcomed the plan, its spokesman, Salim al-Muslat, told reporters. However, he warned that the agreement must show effects before his group would join political talks with government representatives in Switzerland.
“If we see action and implementation, we will see you very soon in Geneva,” he said.
The Southern Front says Russia has conducted about 50 airstrikes a day on its positions since the end of November, a pace unparalleled since the start of the war, and Moscow’s intervention last autumn – advertised as a campaign against Islamic State – has mostly targeted the mainstream opposition.
No comments:
Post a Comment