BRUSSELS: US Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had agreed to look for ways to revive a Syrian peace plan, but admitted that doing so would be extremely difficult.
Kerry, speaking after talks with Lavrov and Nato colleagues in Brussels, also backed away from earlier comments suggesting he was calling for increased Nato contingency planning on Syria.
Kerry said he and Lavrov had discussed ways to revive a peace plan agreed in Geneva last June that called for a transitional government.
“We are both going to go back, we are going to explore those possibilities, and we are going to talk again about if any of those other avenues could conceivably be pursued,” Kerry said.
He said that while there might be a difference of opinion between Russia and the United States about when and how Syrian President Bashar Al Assad might leave office, “I don’t think there’s a difference of opinion that his leaving may either be inevitable or necessary to be able to have a solution.” But, he stressed: “I would say to you that’s it’s a very difficult road ... No one should think there is an easy way to move forward on this.”
Moscow has for months been calling for implementation of the Geneva Declaration agreed by world powers including Russia and the United States, but disagrees with Washington’s assertion that it requires Assad to step down.
Fears resurfaced yesterday of Assad resorting to chemical weapons as rebels battled regime and Hezbollah forces in fierce fighting in Homs province, a watchdog said. Two Orthodox bishops reportedly kidnapped by rebels in northern Syria have been released, a statement from a religious group said. The Paris-based “Oeuvre d’Orient” association said the two — Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim and Bishop Boulos Yaziji, who were seized on Monday — were already at Saint Elias cathedral in Aleppo.
Activists said Hezbollah was fighting alongside Syrian troops in the Qusayr area of the central province of Homs. A Syrian military source insisted, meanwhile, that the capture of the rebel stronghold town of Qusayr was “just days away, at most”. Hezbollah’s role in the fighting has inflamed tensions inside Lebanon, despite its insistence it is only acting to protect Lebanese citizens in Syrian border villages.
Lebanon’s Salafist Sunni Sheikh Ahmed Al Assir has urged his followers to join the fight against Syrian regime and Hezbollah forces in Qusayr, calling it “a religious duty”. The conflict, which began in March 2011 and has killed more than 70,000 people, has regularly spilled across the border, with two new mortar rounds hitting the eastern Lebanese region of Hermel.
In Israel, meanwhile, a senior military intelligence official said Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons, including the nerve gas sarin, against rebel fighters. The US has said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. “To the best of our professional understanding, the regime has made use of deadly chemical weapons against the rebels in a number of incidents in the last few months,” Brigadier General Itai Brunarch told a Tel Aviv security conference.Agencies
