Today, Russia's Foreign Minister, US State Secretary and Foreign Ministers of a number of key countries in the region (Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran) will meet in Lausanne to discuss possible further steps to create conditions for the Syrian crisis settlement. "I have no special expectations. We will offer concrete steps which are necessary for the implementation of these UN Security Council resolutions in order to fulfill the Russian-US agreements. We are not going to propose anything else. Everything is already written in the resolutions. The international community's strategy has been articulated in Russian-US agreements and the International Syria Support Group. The directions are clear: establishing an end to military action in Syria, separation of terrorists from the so-called moderate opposition, humanitarian aid deliveries, the start of peace talks between the Syrian government and rebel representatives without pre-conditions. This is not a Russian line - this is the decision of the international community, supported by the UN Security Council," Sergey Lavrov said yesterday.
According to him, the key issue is the separation of the terrorists and the "moderate opposition": "It is important to understand the processes that disturb us right now. The thing is that Jabhat al-Nusra is not alone. Many groups, positioning themselves as moderate, are beginning to merge with it and refuse to join the agreements on the cessation of hostilities... All the talk about the fact that the main thing is to stop hostilities in Aleppo is just an attempt to shield Jabhat al-Nusra and everyone who cooperate with it. We will offer concrete steps that are necessary for the UN Security Council resolution and the US-Russian agreements to be implemented. Let's see how the Americans and our regional colleagues will react."
Meanwhile, the Unied States view situation differently. Vestnik Kavkaza presents an article of International Business Times about the American position on this situation.
Some top officials argue the United States must act more forcefully in Syria or risk losing what influence it still has over moderate rebels and its Arab, Kurdish and Turkish allies in the fight against Islamic State, the officials told Reuters. One set of options includes direct U.S. military action such as air strikes on Syrian military bases, munitions depots or radar and anti-aircraft bases, said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. This official said one danger of such action is that Russian and Syrian forces are often co-mingled, raising the possibility of a direct confrontation with Russia that Obama has been at pains to avoid.
U.S. officials said they consider it unlikely that Obama will order U.S. air strikes on Syrian government targets, and they stressed that he may not make any decisions at the planned meeting of his National Security Council. One alternative, U.S. officials said, is allowing allies to provide U.S.-vetted rebels with more sophisticated weapons, although not shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, which Washington fears could be used against Western airliners. The White House declined to comment. Friday's planned meeting is the latest in a long series of internal debates about what, if anything, to do to end a 5-1/2 year civil war that has killed at least 300,000 people and displaced half the country's population. The ultimate aim of any new action could be to bolster the battered moderate rebels so they can weather what is now widely seen as the inevitable fall of rebel-held eastern Aleppo to the forces of Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It also might temper a sense of betrayal among moderate rebels who feel Obama encouraged their uprising by calling for Assad to go but then abandoned them, failing even to enforce his own "red line" against Syria's use of chemical weapons. This, in turn, might deter them from migrating to Islamist groups such as the Nusra Front, which the United States regards as Syria's al Qaeda branch. The group in July said it had cut ties to al Qaeda and changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. Another try at diplomacy.
Friday's planned meeting at the White House and the session in Lausanne occur as Obama, with just 100 days left in office, faces other decisions about whether to deepen U.S. military involvement in the Middle East -- notably in Yemen and Iraq -- a stance he opposed when he won the White House in 2008.
Earlier Thursday the United States launched cruise missiles at three coastal radar sites in areas of Yemen controlled by Iran-aligned Houthi forces, retaliating after failed missile attacks this week on a U.S. Navy destroyer, U.S. officials said. In Iraq, U.S. officials are debating whether government forces will need more U.S. support both during and after their campaign to retake Mosul, Islamic State’s de facto capital in the country. Some officials argue the Iraqis now cannot retake the city without significant help from Kurdish peshmerga forces, as well as Sunni and Shi'ite militias, and that their participation could trigger religious and ethnic conflict in the city. In Syria, Washington has turned to the question of whether to take military action after its latest effort to broker a truce with Russia collapsed last month. The United States has called for Assad to step down, but for years has seemed resigned to his remaining in control of parts of the country as it prosecutes a separate fight against Islamic State militants in Syria and in Iraq.
The U.S. policy is to target Islamic State first, a decision that has opened it to charges that it is doing nothing to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and particularly in Aleppo, Syria's largest city. Anthony Cordesman of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank suggested the United States' failure to act earlier in Syria, and in Aleppo in particular, had narrowed Obama's options. "There is only so long you can ignore your options before you don’t have any," Cordesman said.
