US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that seeking military gains will not end the ‘civil war’.
He added there would be ‘repercussions’ if the Syrian government flouted a cessation of violence agreed in February. Speaking in Washington, Kerry said he was hopeful the cessation of violence could be restored, and he warned President Assad of consequences if violations continued.
‘If Assad does not adhere to this, there will clearly be repercussions, and one of them may be the total destruction of the ceasefire and then go back to war. I don’t think Russia wants that,’ he said.
In fact, it is Syrian forces that are under attack in Aleppo by the heavily reinforced Islamists, who are not part of any ceasefire agreement and initially advanced from the western suburbs of the city into government-held neighbourhoods from which they were repelled by Wednesday morning, according to the UK-based US-supporting Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the fighting was ‘the most violent in Aleppo in over a year’. Syrian soldiers and Hezbollah fighters, backed up by Syrian fighter jets and Russian artillery units, repelled the terrorist groups’ offensives and in a rapid coordinated counterattack stormed the militants’ positions and drove them back from the districts of Aleppo.
As diplomatic efforts intensified on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a unilateral truce declared by the Syrian military could be extended to Aleppo ‘in the next few hours’.
After talks with UN envoy Staffan de Mistura in Moscow, he said Russia was working with the UN and US to include Aleppo in the ‘regime of calm’ that has covered Damascus and Latakia since Saturday.
Kerry responded: ‘If Assad’s strategy is to somehow think he’s going to just carve out Aleppo and carve out a section of the country, I’ve got news for him – this war doesn’t end. It is simply physically impossible for Assad to just carve out an area and pretend that he’s somehow going to make it safe, while the underlying issues are unresolved in this war. And as long as Assad is there, the opposition is not going to stop fighting it … one way or the other.’
He reiterated there was an August deadline for starting a political transition in Syria, when, according to Kerry’s reasoning, Assad must be gone, since the opposition is not going to stop fighting ‘as long as Assad is there’.
Earlier this year, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond warned that Russia might be trying to create a mini-state for President Assad in the north-west of the country, which includes Aleppo. Russia strongly denied the idea.
Speaking on Tuesday, Lavrov told reporters that he expected a decision on including Aleppo in the separate regime of calm ‘in the very near future – maybe in the next few hours’.
The unilateral truce had been in effect in Latakia and the eastern Ghouta region around Damascus since the weekend thanks to the efforts of the Russian and US militaries, he said.
The aim of Russian, US and UN negotiators was to extend the regime of calm and ‘ideally make it indefinite’, Lavrov added. However, he urged that so-called moderate rebel groups in Aleppo should leave areas where militants from al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate that is excluded from the cessation of hostilities, were established and were being targeted.
The partial halt in fighting had raised hopes that tentative peace talks in Geneva might bring forward a solution to Syria’s bloody five-year ‘civil war’. But the truce was all but collapsed after the Saudi-backed ‘moderates’ withdrew from the Vienna peace talks.
The Syrian army is driving the terrorists out of Aleppo, and is planning to organise to do the same to Raqqa-based IS forces. It must be supported by working people all over the world.
In fact, the US and British governments will have to get used to the idea that Assad is not going to disappear from the scene at their command, and that only the Syrian people can decide who is to head their government, not the US, the UK or even Russia.
