President Obama said the ceasefire in Syria that collapsed earlier this week still held longer than he expected, and that he plans to press for its enforcement rather than change course.
“The cessation of hostilities actually held longer than I expected,” Obama said Friday during a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron in London. “For seven weeks, we’ve seen a significant reduction in violence inside the country and that gave some relief to people.”
While the president expressed deep concerns about the ceasefire’s apparent collapse, he signaled no intention of moving to a “Plan B” that Secretary of State John Kerry has recently promised if widespread violence returned to the war-torn country.
“We’re not going to solve the overall problem unless we can get this political track moving,” Obama said. “I assure you that we have looked at all the options and none of them are great … so we are going to play this option out.”
“If in fact this cessation falls apart, we’ll try to put it back together again even as we continue to go after ISIL,” he said, referring to the Islamic State.
Obama said he believed Russia will ultimately realize the futility of its military intervention in Syria to help prop up Syrian leader Bashar Assad, and that it will only lead to endless bloodshed without helping to end the civil war.
During a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday, Obama said he stressed the importance of trying to maintain the ceasefire and the talks aimed at providing a political transition to end the bloody five-year civil war.
He said he asked Putin to “put more pressure on Assad, indicating to him that we would continue to try to get the moderate opposition to stay at the negotiating table in Geneva.”
“But this has always been hard, and it’s going to keep being hard,” Obama said.
The president didn’t discuss how Putin responded to his entreaties.
The U.S. ultimately failed to persuade the moderate opposition to remain at the negotiating table this week when a senior representative of that group on Wednesday decided to leave the Geneva talks amid mounting violence in the region.
That move prompted Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations panel, to urge Kerry to quickly move forward with a “Plan B,” which Kerry had repeatedly referenced during testimony to the committee earlier this year.
Some in Congress and the diplomatic community interpreted the reference to a “Plan B” as a stepped-up U.S. military campaign to help the Syrian opposition’s efforts to overthrow Assad.
“This could get a lot uglier,” Kerry warned at the time.
