President Bashar Assad stated that Syria has got real support from the countries of BRICS and Iran, which have managed to help the Syrian peoples to survive in the struggle against terror. He also highly assessed the same positions of Russia and China in the UN Security Council. Meanwhile, the situation remains difficult in Syria. Alexander Kuznetsov, Deputy Director of the Center for Forecasting and Political Settlement of Conflicts, expert on Iranian issues, believes that there is a planned, quite well-organized war against Syria: “Well-trained, well-armed groups are fighting with the support of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Some groups receive US weapons, some groups operate independently, others coordinate military actions with each other. That is why I would not talk about terrorism here. Terrorism is simply an unconventional method of warfare. Here we are dealing with aggression against Syria as against a sovereign state.”
Speaking about the armed opposition, Kuznetsov points out that a few of the largest groups there are non-Syrian by their origin, by their genesis: “There is IS, which originally appeared on Iraqi territory, most of the administrative board of this group are Iraqis. There are many former officers of Saddam Hussein's army, ex-Ba'athists. And now there is a very strong inflow of personnel from abroad, there you can find Tunisians, Yemenis, even one German, a German citizen who converted to Islam, he now commands one of the armies of IS. How can these people be considered as the Syrian opposition? This is nonsense.”
Kuznetsov notes that it is necessary to make a distinction between the two groups, which are waging war against the legitimate government, and certainly most of them are external in origin, in their financing. At the same time, according to the expert, the government is in control of half of the country. “The population flees to the territory controlled by the government. This shows the trust in and support for the government of Bashar Assad from most Syrians. It is necessary to proceed from this. The international community is behaving very crudely in relation Syria, and very harshly. If the international community is concerned about human rights in Syria, about compliance with these rights, first they must lift the economic sanctions against Syria. This is the first step. Another important step that must be taken is to stop external support for militants and opposition groups. If this funding, external support will be stopped, then within two years, I believe, Syrians will deal with each other one way or another. Most extremist groups will be destroyed, more moderate ones will come to the negotiating table and find some kind of consensus. But as long as the external support continues, the Syrian conflict will continue.”
