US to Discuss Syria with Jordan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey | nsnbc international - 0 views
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he would meet Jordanian, Russian, Saudi Arabian and Turkish representatives in the coming days to discuss the situation in Syria. Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy comes as Russian airstrikes, coordinated with the Syrian government have sent scores of ISIL, Jabhat Al-Nusrah and other insurgents flee Syria.
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The Russian-led initiative has significantly altered the strategic balance and has a number of complex geopolitical implications, e.g. Russia potentially re-asserting regional influence comparable with the influence Moscow had in the region prior to the discontinuation of the USSR.
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On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry informed the Russian State news agency Tass that Moscow is studying the proposal tabled by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. The news agency cites a ministerial source as saying “We know about this proposal, we are studying it”. Sergey Ivanov, Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidency stated that a political settlement about Syria would begin to take shape sooner or later. Ivanov added that this would involve a compromise between a “sensible opposition” and the Syrian government. Ivanov added: “It is crystal-clear that military means alone will never bring about a settlement in Syria. In the final count a political solution will have to begin to be looked for,” Ivanov said adding that this process could be very complicated and controversial. … Any sensible opposition can be negotiated with and compromises are to be mutual — that’s pretty clear,” he said calling it “a matter of the distant future. … Originally, the idea of an intra-Syrian alliance in the struggle against the Islamic State was not ours: it came from the French President, Francois Hollande. He speculated that the government troops under Bashar Assad and the so-called Free Syrian Army might present a common front. Of course, if the latter does exist in reality, and is not a virtual brainchild of some armchair pundits in the West.”
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Last week Syria’s First Deputy Prime Minister Faisal Mikdad reiterated that the government was ready to immediately proceed with attempts to find a political settlement with what he describes as a “worthy national opposition”. Mikdad said: “We are ready to immediately sit down at the negotiating table with the worthy national opposition, but not with the opposition connected with external forces,” the agency quotes him as saying. “We are prepared to take part in the work of four groups to seek ways out of the conflict set up at the initiative of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.” One of the most persistent points of contention between the Syrian government and the foreign-backed, foreign-based opposition groups is the opposition’s demand for the formation of a transitional government. While the Syrian government does not reject such a transitional government on an a priori basis, it insists that it has no constitutional mandate to form any government without involving the Syrian electorate.