Obama: Assad must go to end Syria war

Much of northern Syria is held by the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, two groups that have already been excluded from the cease-fire. They aren’t just a threat in the Middle East, but have proven they have the capacity to successfully kill in the West.

A day after the horrific attacks in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced a silver lining: The world had come together and agreed to end the Syrian civil war.

French President Francois Hollande will visit Washington and Moscow next week for talks on pooling US, Russian and French efforts against IS.

Obama has once again made it clear that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go if the Syrian civil war has to end.

“One year and a half (18 months) to two years is enough for any transition”.

Hours later, Russian long-range bombers attacked Raqqa, the de facto capital of so-called caliphate of ISIS.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the October 31 crash that killed 224, and Putin has vowed to hunt down those responsible and punish them.

He said that political process in Syria “will get nowhere” if there is no “serious and effective” fight against terrorism. Both Iran and Russian Federation are hard to read and predict – and until now, both have backed Assad’s insistence that he stay in power through the rest of his official term, which runs until 2021.

Obama has said that Assad’s status remained a sticking point to such coordination with Russian Federation, and that the USA would continue to evaluate whether Russian Federation was serious about focusing its military strikes against Islamic State instead of those forces battling Assad.

France launched major airstrikes in Syria after the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, which took the lives of 129 people, injuring over 350. Putin indicated his forces would support Assad, an ally, by targeting Islamic State. “So we’re going through the analysis piece now to try to determine exactly what they hit”, Colonel Warren said.

Cutting a deal with Assad would be the “lesser evil”, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said Wednesday.

“It seems to me there are no longer any doubts that it is simply unacceptable to put forward any pre-conditions for joining forces in the fight against terror”, Lavrov said. He was previously President Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

During the brief conversation with reporters at Capitol Hill, America’s top diplomat also took issue with anti-refugee sentiments expressed by US lawmakers and governors.

Video was also released of Russian air strikes hitting a column of oil tankers in the Syrian desert, which they also claimed belonged to Isis.

That said, “Russia has a role to play diplomatically”, he adds, which might include putting pressure on Iran and Mr. Assad to bring them to the negotiating table. Turkey has been fighting its own Kurdish population since the 1980s and is keen to prevent the group from gaining traction in neighboring Syria. “That said, you know, they were attempting to strike ISIL targets”, which would be a net plus, he said, using the U.S. government’s acronym for the Islamic State.