‘US should negotiate with Syria’

SHARM EL-SHEIKH. — The United States will have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a political transition in Syria and is exploring ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks, US Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in an interview.

Washington has long insisted that Assad must be replaced through a negotiated, political transition, but the rise of a common enemy, hard-line militant group Islamic State, appears to have slightly softened the West’s stance towards him.

In the interview broadcast yesterday, Kerry did not repeat the standard US line that Assad had lost all legitimacy and had to go.

Syria’s civil war is now into its fifth year, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of Syrians displaced.

“We have to negotiate in the end,” Kerry said.

“We’ve always been willing to negotiate in the context of the Geneva I process,” he added, referring to a 2012 conference which called for a negotiated transition to end the conflict.

Kerry said the United States and other countries, which he did not name, were exploring ways to reignite the diplomatic process to end the conflict in Syria.

“What we’re pushing for is to get him (Assad) to come and do that, and it may require that there be increased pressure on him of various kinds in order to do that,” the secretary of state said.

“We’ve made it very clear to people that we are looking at increased steps that can help bring about that pressure,” he added.

The United States led efforts to convene a UN-backed peace talks in Geneva last year between Western-backed Syrian opposition representatives and a government delegation. The talks collapsed after two rounds and no fresh talks have been scheduled.

Russia convened some opposition and government figures in January for talks on the crisis but they yielded little progress and the main opposition coalition boycotted them. — Reuters.