Is Russia Calling The Shots In Syria?
As the United States and world powers gather again in an attempt to end Syria's civil war, Russia appears to be calling the shots, AP reports.
AP notes that:
Nations meeting Friday in New York and the U.N. will essentially be negotiating a Russian plan for a "political transition," based on the Syrian government's consent and with no clear reference to President Bashar Assad's departure.
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In many ways, the parameters of the international mediation were framed early on in Syria's war by disagreements between Washington and Moscow. Russia prevailed in many of these disputes.
Russia's military intervention in Syria "appears to be providing the key leverage" for world powers to secure and enforce a peace, AP writes.
As President Barack Obama said earlier this month, rebels who join the process could enjoy "pockets of cease-fire" where they no longer face Syrian or Russian bombs.
Moscow -- Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's strongest ally -- has backed the UN's push for local ceasefires between the Syrian government and rebel fighters, and has supported efforts by the UN's special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, to find a political settlement to the Syrian crisis.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in October that Russia had "actively encouraged the sides to the Syrian conflict to actively agree on humanitarian pauses, local ceasefires."
Earlier this month, a rare ceasefire deal in the al-Waer district of Homs saw hundreds of Syrians, including rebel fighters, leave the last rebel-held area of the city -- following a major offensive to the north of Homs by Syrian government forces backed by Russian air strikes.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on December 16 that it and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent had delivered aid to thousands of people in al-Waer following the ceasefire.
While some residents of al-Waer expressed anger at the deal, there was also "profound relief," the Guardian reported.
Russian President Putin has discussed the Syrian crisis and terror financing with the permanent members of the Russian Security Council, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said according to TASS.
German authorities say a man who was detained at a refugee center in the western town of Unna yesterday on suspicion of ties with the IS group denies membership in the organization and has been released after the authorities could not prove that he was, AP reports.
The man, a 31-year-old Syrian, had been accused on an Arabic-language website of having worked for IS.
Russia's Foreign Ministry has once again accused Turkey of involvement in illegal shipments of IS oil.
The ministry said that "not all countries are conscientious about their obligations to stop IS funding, the largest volume of IS oil exports go through Turkey," RIA Novosti reports.
Some Muslims in France are taking the government to court, accusing it of illegal acts in the name of preventing another terror attack, Reuters report.
Following the November 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, France declared a state of emergency giving authorities extra powers to conduct raids and place people under house arrest. France has since carried out hundreds of police raids on homes, mosques, hotels and restaurants.
But at least 20 complaints have been filed since the state of emergency was declared, mostly alleging that the government has acting illegally in placing people under house arrest for reasons that are not justified.
Iran's Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has called on the international community to "join hands to put into effect an immediate end to the bloodshed" in Syria.
Zarif made his comments in an opinion piece in The Guardian today, hours before the UN and the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) -- a group of Western and regional states overseeing the Syrian peace process -- meet in New York.
Iran is a staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom the United States and other countries say must step down.
But Zarif criticized the "preconditions" that he said were hampering a political solution in Syria and which he said "do not represent the wishes of the Syrian people; rather, they reflect the agendas of outside actors."
Russian President Putin made a similar argument in a press conference yesterday.
Zarif implicitly criticized Saudi Arabia, saying that "those who have denied their own population the most rudimentary tenets of democracy, such as a constitution and elections, are now self-declared champions of democracy in Syria."
The Iranian foreign minister also criticized those he said were "sponsoring terrorists," repeating an argument that Moscow has made that the West has differentiated between "good" and "bad" terrorists:
Indeed, it is alarming that some are oblivious to how bands of villains such as [IS] or al-Qaeda’s multiple incarnations and reincarnations are a common threat to all of us, including their patrons. It is delusional to believe that sponsoring these terrorists, directly or through their newborn ideological siblings, can ever be an asset or leverage to achieve even short-term political objectives. Yet those who support militant extremism are not only continuing to do so, but they sponsor terror with impunity. They even use their political patronages and web of lobbyists to seek to legitimize such assistance, and its recipients, by differentiating between “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”.
While terrorism "has no religion, no nationality or ethnic background," Zarif said that it has "backers with known addresses and horrific agendas."
The UK government's @UKagainstDaesh Twitter account, which tweets updates on the UK's involvement in the campaign against the IS group, says that the Iraqi government has launched a campaign to help reduce civilian casualties in the city of Ramadi.
Iraqi troops are currently fighting to liberate Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar province, from the IS group.
Baghdadi is advising civilians in Ramadi how to stay safe around IS bombs and mines.
A common IS tactic when pushed out of an area is to booby trap buildings including civilian homes.
A gunman in Mali has killed three people outside a Christian radio station in the city of Timbuktu, local officials say.
"At least one Catholic" was killed in the attack as well as a radio presenter, a local government official said.
A senior official in the governor's office told AFP blamed the shooting on Islamist extremists and said it was a "jihadist attack aimed at dividing Muslims and Catholics."
The radio station, Tahanite, was banned from broadcasting any Bible-related programming during the 2012 occupation of Timbuktu by Al-Qaeda linked militants, AFP report.
Syrian Deputy FM: Erdogan 'Selling Syrian & Iraqi Oil'
By accusing Syria of buying oil from the IS group, Turkish President Erdogan is "trying to remove a shadow from his own family," Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad has said.
In an interview this morning with pro-Kremlin news agency RIA Novosti, Mekdad said Turkey was "distorting the picture" regarding IS oil sales.
Erdogan and his family were "working with Syrian and Iraqi oil, selling it on the Turkish internal market and in several other countries. We are ready to throw [Erdogan] a challenge -- let him present just one piece of evidence for his words," Mekdad said.
Mekdad said that Damascus was buying oil as needed from "friendly states" including Iran, which was sending three oil tankers via sea to Syria every month.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has given a wide-ranging interview to Dutch public broadcaster NOS.
A video of the interview is available on NOS's website this morning.
Syrian state news agency SANA has a transcript of the interview on its website.
On the issue of the U.S.-led coalition bombing IS targets in Syria, Assad said this was illegal without the permission of his government.
Assad: This is illegal. This is against the international law. We are a sovereign country. If you are serious about fighting terrorism, what is the obstacle for that government to call the Syrian government, to say “let’s cooperate in fighting terrorism?” The only obstacle is that the Western policy today towards Syria is “we need to isolate this state, that president, so we cannot deal with him.” Okay, you cannot reach anything then.
Assad was asked why he thought militants from countries like the Netherlands were going to fight alongside groups like IS in Syria.
Assad: The most important question is: why did you have them in Europe? Coming, that’s natural; when you have chaos, when Syria has been turned into a hotbed for terrorism because Europe and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and those countries supported terrorists in different ways, of course you’re going to have chaos, and it’s going to be a nexus for terrorism. That’s natural for this, how to say, fertile soil, to attract terrorists from the rest of the world. But the question: why did you have them in Europe? You didn’t deal with terrorism in a realistic base.
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I think it’s about two things, if you ask me about why. First of all, the European governments didn’t do their job to integrate these people in their societies; they lived in a ghetto. When you live in a ghetto, you’re going to be an extremist. The second one, many European officials have sold their values for the petrodollar, and they allowed the Wahabi Saudi institutions to pay money and to bring this dark and this extremist ideology to Europe, and that’s why now you are exporting terrorists to us. We don’t export, actually, they came to Syria, and then they go back to Europe.
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And the three criminals who committed the attacks in Paris, all of them lived in Europe; Belgium and France and others. They didn’t live in Syria