Iran Says Defeating Islamic State More Urgent Than Assad Removal

While most of his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls are calling for a bigger military effort to destroy the group, Trump said the USA should reduce its already small footprint in Syria.

In an interview in Moscow last week, excerpts of which were made available Sunday, President Putin denounced USA support of Syrian rebels.

US Secretary of State John Kerry expressed concern in a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that Russian backing would embolden Assad to cling on to power and thwart any hopes for peace.

The Iranian leader said “everyone has accepted that President Assad must remain so we can combat terrorists“.

As Syria’s chaotic, multi-front and multi-player war has expanded, the administration itself now appears to have softened its terms for Assad’s departure. “This is not yet coordinated”, Kerry said.

The Iraqi coordination may rub the United States the wrong way, as they are having only limited coordination with Russian Federation and refusing to do much of anything with either Syria or Iran.

There’s growing acknowledgment among the USA and its allies that the previous hard-line isolationist strategy toward the Syrian leader will not shorten the civil war. If that means joining the United States in airstrikes, there is room for both to operate without running into each other.

The conflict – which has cost more than 250,000 lives, left Europe struggling to deal with a huge influx of refugees and enabled the rise of Islamic State extremists – is set to dominate the annual UN General Assembly. Though Russian Federation is unlikely to do anything inside Iraq to fight ISIS, the fact that they’re sharing intelligence back and forth may also give Iraq some leverage it didn’t have with the US-led coalition.

“Conversations about how we bring about transition are important and that’s what we want to see greater impetus on”, Cameron said. Preservation of this territory under the current government would also preserve long-term Russian military equities, including a naval base.

Efforts to engage Tehran – a close ally of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria – in a push to end the protracted civil war have been spurred on by a thaw in relations with the West. This allows for military force to “maintain or restore global peace and security”.

“What matters now is a broad and comprehensive plan as the foundation for a political solution to the conflict,” he said in an e-mailed statement. A decision to do so – effectively opening up a land bridge from neighboring Iraq in the east – would require Obama to sign off on a change in US vetting procedures for the recipients of USA weapons and ammunition in Syria. But he warned that if getting rid of Assad is the top goal, as soon as that happens “the terrorists will enter Damascus immediately” as well as other cities controlled by the government, and all will fall to Daesh, an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State extremist group.

The USA has agreed to talk with Russian Federation about “de-conflicting” their military action in Syria.

The Central Command has formulated new plans for the train-and-equip program that would jettison the idea of establishing a new fighting force.