adminSyrian Deputy Prime Minister has said that neither the government forces nor the rebels are currently capable of outright military victory in the country’s civil war.
Qadri Jamil told the British Guardian newspaper that the government of President Bashar al-Assad would call for a ceasefire with the armed opposition if the peace talks in Geneva, sought by world powers, took place.
Rebels have been fighting government forces in a civil war which has claimed 100 000 lives since 2011. Rebel forces control large areas of the country while better-armed forces loyal to Assad retain Damascus and key army bases.
“Neither the armed opposition nor the regime is capable of defeating the other side,” Jamil said in the interview, which was published yesterday.
“This zero balance of forces will not change for a while.”
The use of chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb on 21 August brought Washington close to ordering a strike against Assad, whom the West blames for the attack that the UN says killed 1 429 people.
Earlier this week, however, Russia and the US agreed a deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, averting a strike. The plan must now go the UN Security Council and win Syria’s full compliance.
On Thursday, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, called on the Security Council to “stand up and speak out in the strongest possible terms about the importance of enforceable action to rid the world of Syria’s chemical weapons”.
“Now the test comes. The Security Council must be prepared to act next week,” Kerry said.
Envoys from the five big UN powers have been meeting in New York for several days to negotiate a draft resolution to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control.
Asked during the Guardian interview what proposals the Syrian government would bring to the proposed Geneva conference, Jamil said:
“An end to external intervention, a ceasefire and the launching of a peaceful political process in a way that the Syrian people can enjoy self-determination without outside intervention and in a democratic way.”
The Guardian quoted Jamil as saying the Syrian economy had lost about $100bn, equivalent to two years of normal production, during the war.
Jamil, a veteran communist with a doctorate from Moscow state university, holds the post of deputy prime minister for economic affairs and minister of international trade and consumer protection. — AFP
Meanwhile, Tunisian women have travelled to Syria to wage “sex jihad” by comforting Islamist fighters battling the regime there, Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou has told MPs.
“They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday.
“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of ‘jihad al-nikah’ — (sexual holy war, in Arabic) — they come home pregnant,” Ben Jeddou told the MPs.
He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters.
Jihad al-nikah, permitting extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war. The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.
Hundreds of Tunisian men have also gone to join the ranks of the jihadists fighting to bring down the regime of President Bashar Assad.
However, Ben Jeddou also said that since he assumed office in March, “six thousand of our young people have been prevented from going there” to Syria.
He has said in the past that border controls have been boosted to intercept young Tunisians seeking to travel to Syria. Media reports say thousands of Tunisians have, over the past 15 years, joined jihadists across the world in Afghanistan Iraq and Syria, mainly travelling via Turkey or Libya.
Abu Iyadh, who leads the country’s main Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia, is the suspected organiser of a deadly attack last year on the US embassy in Tunis and an Afghanistan veteran.
He was joint leader of a group responsible for the 9 September 2001 assassination in Afghanistan of anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud by suicide bombers. — AFP
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