Syrian peace talks set to begin Friday in Geneva are falling apart even before they start, as Syrian opposition leaders are openly doubting the ability of the Obama administration to end President Bashar Assad’s brutal regime.
Secretary of State John Kerry is pressing ahead with the talks, deferring questions about who will participate to the United Nations envoy charged with running them. But it’s clear from opposition leaders, who have spoken to Republican senators and others, that they don’t trust Kerry or the rest of the administration.
After the Iran nuclear deal, opposition groups worry that President Obama will be too willing to work with Iran and Russia and cut a bad deal for them.
Syria is a stain on President Obama’s foreign policy legacy, and Syrian opposition groups could simply bide their time and wait for the next U.S. president to arrive. But they are facing a new threat from Russia’s military support for Assad, and some rebel groups are feeling increasingly boxed in, worried that Assad could regain enough power over the next year to permanently end any real prospect for any peace settlement.
When asked about reports that Kerry has threatened to cut off funding for the Syrian opposition if they don’t participate in the U.N. peace effort, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker said he wasn’t sure what was going on.
“I don’t know what is and isn’t true. Obviously the Syrian opposition has to be fully represented at the table or you’re not going to end up with an agreement that amounts to much,” he told the Washington Examiner Wednesday. “I don’t know what’s being said to force that to happen … [I] don’t have great hopes relative to Friday.”
Later Wednesday night, Corker issued a statement after speaking on the phone with a senior representative of the Syrian opposition and emphasized that the rebels cannot be dragged to the negotiating table while their immediate humanitarian needs are ignored.
“Today I heard from Dr. Riyad Hijab, a senior representative of the Syrian opposition,” Corker said. “As we know, the Assad regime, along with their Russian backers, continues to besiege cities, target civilians from the air and use starvation as a tactic of war against its own people. So, I can understand the tremendous frustration I heard today from the Syrian opposition.”
“They believe the context of the negotiations for a Syrian peace process has now shifted from what was originally passed in a recent U.N. Security Council Resolution,” he continued. “A process that prematurely forces the Syrian opposition to the table without taking into consideration their concerns — such as humanitarian access and the release of women and children wrongly imprisoned in Syria — will not produce the desired outcome.”
Andrew Bowen, a senior fellow at the Center for National Interest, met with opposition leaders late last week and was told the groups feel that Kerry has become too tight with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, through the Iran nuclear negotiations, and is too eager to cut a deal to bolster the administration’s beleaguered legacy on Syria.
“He continues to see Zarif and [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov as partners and he has never connected very well with the Syrian opposition,” Bowen said of Kerry in an interview. “I met with the Syrian opposition last week and they expressed the deep sense that the United States no longer has their interests at heart … there is a sense that the U.S. is being duplicitous.”
The groups are particularly worried that Kerry would accept a deal in which Assad could run for re-election.
There’s a sense that the “danger of the talks is they would simply solidify what is going on on the ground and establish a permanent status quo for Iran and Assad,” Bowen said.
Kerry, while traveling to Laos earlier this week, denied threatening the opposition with a loss of financial support and repeated the administration’s refrain that Assad must go for Syria to truly resolve the conflict.
“We hope that they will fully understand we support getting a ceasefire, we support getting humanitarian access … again, we’ve said 100,000 times, Assad cannot be part of the long-term future of Syria because you can’t end the war if he is. It’s very simple. Nothing has changed,” he insisted.
But Kerry also expressed new hope that Iran and Russia, who have signed onto a ceasefire agreement, would cooperate and continue to compromise to attain a real peace settlement. “We are going to know very quickly, in a month or two or three, whether these guys are serious,” he said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., brushed that talk aside and said the Russian military’s gains in Syria have bolstered Assad’s position so much that it would unreasonable to expect they would compromise now.
“The Iranians and Bashar Assad with the help of the Russians are winning. Why would they agree to anything? They’re not going to agree to anything meaningful,” he told the Examiner.
The Obama administration, McCain said, will sell out the Syrian opposition “in a New York minute.”
“That’s what they’ve done so far. They’re sitting by watching the Iranians bomb to hell the moderate opposition,” he said.
But Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, countered that the Obama administration has little choice but to try to bring all sides to the table and negotiate, even if the prospects for a lasting peace settlement remain dim.
“Look, the grinding, terrible Syrian civil war is only going to be resolved through a negotiated resolution,” he said. “All sides have been trying to win by engaging in tactics on the battlefield that have killed hundreds of thousands of people.”
“We have no choice but to try and try and try again to convene folks who are participants in the conflict and who are willing and able to negotiate with each other,” he concluded.
