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The fate of the Middle East is riding on the success of Russia’s intervention after the failure of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), Syrian President Bashar Assad said.
“The alliance between Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran must succeed or else the whole region will be destroyed,” Assad said in an Oct. 4 interview broadcast by Iranian state television. “The chances of success for this coalition are great and not insignificant.”
Several Western and Gulf countries continue to insist Assad must step down after a four-year civil war that has seen more than 240,000 people killed and several hundred thousand more displaced.
“If the solution was me stepping down I would not hesitate,” Assad said in the interview.
British Prime Minister David Cameron on Oct. 4 urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to “change direction” in Syria and recognize that Assad must be replaced.
“Tragically, what has happened is that most of the Russian air strikes, as far as we have been able to see so far, have been in parts of Syria not controlled by ISIL but by other opponents of the (Assad) regime,” Cameron told the BBC.
A spokesman for Putin challenged the Cameron’s and the West’s distinction between terrorists and other Islamist rebel groups in Syria.
Putin “expressed a lively interest in the subject and asked what the difference between the moderate opposition and the immoderate opposition is”, Dmitry Peskov said on Oct. 3. “So far, no one really has managed to explain what the moderate opposition is.”
Meanwhile, the chief commentator at the UAE-based newspaper The National has said that the Middle East is no longer counting on U.S. President Barack Obama to do anything.
Faisal Al Yafai said after the Russian “surge” into Syria that “America and its allies now look like the only group without a plan.”
Russia and Iran’s goal is “nothing less than the replacement of the U.S.-Israel axis with one of their own,” Yafai said.
“What would it take to make the Americans intervene? Would it take children and women being slaughtered? Well that happened. Will it take millions of people on the move? That happened. Will it take hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered? Well that happened,” Yafai told Reuters.
“America wasn’t willing at any point to intervene so why now would it suddenly intervene? It is a free field for Putin and the Russians.”
At stake in Syria: Replacing the U.S.-Israel axis with that of Russia and Iran added by World Tribune on
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