DAMASCUS: Russia said yesterday that President Bashar Assad could leave power as part of a settlement to end bloodshed in Syria, as Damascus agreed to allow relief workers to visit four trouble spots.
“We have never said or insisted that Assad necessarily had to remain in power at the end of the political process,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said in Switzerland.
“This issue has to be settled by the Syrians themselves,” ITAR-TASS news agency quoted him as saying.
Moscow has been facing mounting pressure to back Assad’s departure as a first step in a settlement that would see his inner circle assume command in the interim, based on a US-backed transition in Yemen earlier this year.
Yesterday’s statement was one of its most explicit about Assad’s position since Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov refused to clearly back his rule during a visit to Damascus in February. Russian President Vladimir Putin began talks with President Hu Jintao, a day ahead of a meeting with Hu’s likely successor Vice President Xi Jinping.
China’s envoy to the United Nations said Monday that efforts to end the Syrian bloodshed were at a “crossroads,” and that government and opposition forces must halt violence. Both it and Russia, which have twice used their veto powers to block tougher action against Assad’s regime at the UN Security Council, have come under mounting pressure to change their stance since last month’s Houla massacre.
China’s Ambassador Li Baodong said the massacre of at least 108 people, most of them women and children, had dealt a huge blow to UN-Arab envoy Kofi Annan’s mediation mission, as Beijing took over the chair of the Security Council for June. Li told reporters, without signalling any easing in China’s opposition to sanctions against Assad: “The political process to solve the Syrian crisis is at a crossroads.”
Bloodshed has persisted in Syria despite a UN-backed peace plan brokered by Annan that put almost 300 observers on the ground. Access has been more restricted for aid agencies, however, and the United Nations said yesterday that Syria’s government has now given them permission to visit four locations following a meeting on scaling up humanitarian aid.
On the ground, 15 soldiers were killed in clashes with rebels in western Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Elsewhere, troops and pro-regime militia backed by tanks went on a new offensive against rebels, seizing the central town of Kfar Zita after three days of bombardment, the Observatory said, adding rebels had withdrawn. Four civilians were killed overnight in a “huge military operation” in the Kfar Oweid area of Idlib, a province near Turkey that is a rebel stronghold.
The Observatory said the flashpoint central city of Homs came under artillery fire “as part of a campaign by regular forces to destroy them completely.”
