Failure in Syria’s campaign against Islamic State – backed by its loyal friends Russia and Iran – would mean the “destruction” of the Middle East, Bashar al-Assand warned on Sunday as Moscow launched airstrikes against rebel targets for the fifth consecutive day.
Speaking on the Iranian TV channel Khabar the Syrian president said the Russian campaign could succeed because it is supported by Tehran and thus has international backing – though not from the US and its western and Arab allies which he said had failed in their own year-long campaign against Isis “because the thief cannot be himself the policeman who protects the city from thieves”.
Assad, sounding confident, said he was optimistic because pressure was growing on the “governments which support terrorism” and because of Vladimir Putin’s decision to form “a coalition which includes Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria”. Calls for him to leave office or bow out after serving in a transitional government “mean nothing to us,” he insisted. Only the Syrian people could decide who would govern them.
“For how long this war will continue? This war will continue until either terrorism defeats the people or the people defeat terrorists. So, we pin great hope on this coalition now and on these international changes.” Failure would mean that “we face the destruction of the whole region,” he said.
Assad’s comments came as airstrikes by suspected Russian jets hit targets around the town of Talbiseh, north of Homs in western Syria on Sunday. Ambulances rushed the injured to hospital and one resident said at least five bodies had been recovered. “So far there are seven or six raids in the town,” Abdul Ghafar al Dweik, told Reuters.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the four-and-a-half year-old war through a network of sources on the ground, said Russian planes struck in Homs province and also in neighbouring Hama. Several rebel groups around Talbiseh operate under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), some of them receiving military support from western and Gulf Arab states.
Syrian media quoted a military source saying Russian jets struck near Raqqa, the Isis stronghold, as well as the western towns of Maarat al-Numaan and Jisr al-Shughour, where rival insurgents are more prominent. In Moscow the Russian defence ministry said its jets had hit 10 Isis positions including four command points and a suicide bomber training camp. “We have managed to disrupt their control system, the terrorist organisation’s supply lines, and also caused significant damage to the infrastructure used to prepare acts of terror,” it said.Russia, like Syria, makes no distinction between different rebel groups fighting Assad, describing them all as “terrorists”.
Assad told Khabar there was no time frame for the Russian campaign, but he made clear it had been coordinated in advance with the Syrian military. According to one senior Russian official it could last for three or four months.
The political fallout from Putin’s initiative continued meanwhile in Washington, where John McCain said on Sunday the US was now engaged in a proxy war with Russia as a result of “an abdication of American leadership” on the part of the Obama administration. The chairman of the Senate armed forces committee also said Putin was “treating the United States with disdain and contempt” over Syria, carrying out air strikes and “inserting himself into the Middle East in a way that Russia has not been since Anwar Sadat (the then Egyptian president) threw them out in 1973”.
(The Guardian)
Last Friday, discussing Russian airstrikes against both Isis militants and non-Isis forces opposed to Assad, and which he called “a recipe for disaster”, Obama said: “We’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia. That would be bad strategy on our part. This is not some super power chessboard contest.”
Appearing on CNN, McCain said: “Of course it is [a proxy war] and when the president says we’re not going to have that strategy, we don’t have a strategy. Excuse me? We don’t have a strategy.”
