JEDDAH/ISTANBUL: Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said yesterday Syrian President Bashar Assad and his regime should have no role in the proposed peace talks aimed at ending that country’s deadly conflict.
Prince Saud also warned against the danger of Iran’s nuclear program to the region’s security and said Iran should not threaten its neighbors since countries in the region harbor no ill-intentions to the Islamic Republic.
“We stress the danger of the Iranian nuclear program to the security of the whole region,” he said during a joint press conference with visiting Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid in Jeddah.
Prince Saud said he hoped that the conference, which is proposed to take place in Geneva, would lead to an “immediate cease-fire and meet the aspirations of the Syrian people to achieve a peaceful transfer of power.”
“We support the will of the Syrian people, which has expressed its will clearly, saying it does not wish to see any role in the conference for Bashar Assad, or any of those whose hands are stained with Syrian blood,” he reporters in Jeddah.
He urged the international community to empower Syrian citizens to defend themselves against the brutality of the Syrian regime.
He also emphasized the international community’s obligation to work on ensuring the safe transfer of power in Syria, stressing the legitimacy of the Syrian opposition.
As Assad's forces launched a fierce onslaught on Saturday on a rebel-held border town to try to gain the upper hand in the civil war, Syria’s opposition resumed talks on Saturday aimed at closing their fractious ranks.
A failure of the opposition to unite could weaken the hand of Russia and the United States, co-sponsors of a proposed peace conference on the war, which has killed more than 94,000 people and threatens to spill over borders and whip up wider sectarian violence.
The peace conference is a joint Russian and US proposal to bring together representatives of the Syrian opposition and Assad’s regime.
However, the opposition’s long-standing position has been that it will not negotiate until Assad agrees to leave, and there is no formal precondition for the conference of him stepping down.
The US and Russian foreign ministers are to meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how to shepherd Assad and the opposition into the talks in Geneva.
Assault on Qusair
In the Sunni Muslim border town of Qusair near Syria's border with Lebanon, Assad’s forces reinforced by Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah fighters unleashed heavy artillery and tank fire to try to seize more rebel terrain on Saturday, sources on both sides said.
George Sabra, the acting head of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, said thousands of fighters from Iran and Hezbollah were involved in the attack on Qusair, close to the Lebanese border, and in battles in the capital Damascus.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said his group would stay in the Syrian conflict “to the end of the road” and would win the war for Assad’s government.
“We accept this responsibility and will accept all sacrifices and expected consequences of this position,” he said in a televised speech, speaking from an undisclosed location. “We will be the ones who bring it victory, God willing.”
Assad’s forces are believed to have seized about two-thirds of Qusair and largely surrounded the rebels. But the price was high and rebels insisted they were preventing further advances.
The insurgents see Qusair as a critical battle to preserve cross-border supply lines and deny Assad a victory they fear may give him the edge in the prospective peace talks next month.
More than 22 people in opposition-held areas were killed by Saturday afternoon, most of them rebels, and dozens wounded, according to pro-opposition monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The pro-opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights said 73 people were killed by Assad’s forces, and opposition campaigner Adib Shishakly said Nasrallah lost 75 fighters in the battle for Qusair and that rebel defenders were doing “an excellent job.”
US concerns
The United States, concerned by the rising influence of hard-line Islamists, has pressed the SNC to resolve its divisions and bring more liberals into the fold.
Sources at the coalition, which began its third day of meetings, said major players would focus on such international demands for a broadening of the Islamist-dominated group, leaving leadership issues for later.
Attempts to strike a grand bargain involving veteran liberal campaigner Michel Kilo and businessman Mustafa Al-Sabbagh, Qatar’s point man in the coalition, went nowhere in talks that stretched overnight, senior coalition sources said.
“We are back to square one,” one of them told Reuters.
In Addis Ababa, on the sidelines of an African Union summit, US Secretary of State John Kerry appealed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “to try to get something moving with respect to Syria,” according to a pool reporter. Ban told Kerry he and his special Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi “are working very hard to convene, to make this Geneva conference a success.”
The inability of the coalition to alter its Islamist-dominated membership and replace a leadership damaged by power struggles is playing into the hands of Assad who, according to Russia, intends to send representatives to the peace conference.
— Additional input from Agencies
