Hezbollah leader says he asked Assad for IS evacuation

Illustrative Syrian President Bashar Assad performs Eid prayers in the Hamad Mosque in Damascus August 19
Illustrative Syrian President Bashar Assad performs Eid prayers in the Hamad Mosque in Damascus August 19
Author

01 September, 2017

"We can not build peace with Assad", Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on France's RTL radio.

"We can not build peace with Assad".

"He can not be the solution", said Le Drian, who was defence minister in the former Socialist government.

"This transition can not be done with Bashar al-Assad who murdered part of his population and who has led millions of Syrians to leave their territory".

But Mr Macron said that the fight against ISIL was a priority for France, which has endured a string of terror attacks that have killed more than 230 people since 2015, some planned in Syria.

Le Drian has previously said the contact group would aim to help United Nations -brokered peace talks in Geneva that have stalled in large part down to the weakness of opposition groups and an intransigence by the Assad government to enter meaningful negotiations given its position of strength on the ground.

Macron has tasked Le Drian with forming a new contact group on Syria to relaunch the stalled political process.

Several global contact groups have previously tried to resolve the crisis, including in 2015, when the worldwide Syria Support Group gathered all the main regional actors, including Iran, but was disbanded after the Syrian government retook the rebel stronghold of Aleppo.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said last month that he hoped to launch "real, substantive" peace talks between the government and a still-to-be-formed unified Syrian opposition in October.

De Mistura has hosted seven rounds of largely unsuccessful talks in Geneva, with Assad's fate one of the main obstacles to progress.

Iran backs Syrian government forces in the civil war that began in Syria in 2011.

Hezbollah-aligned al Akhbar newspaper in Lebanon reported on Thursday that some IS leaders in eastern Syria did not want members of the group who had surrendered territory to be welcomed back into their self-declared caliphate.

Assad prayed in Bilal mosque in Qarat, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Damascus.

Confined to Damascus for long periods in the early part of Syria's six-year civil war, Assad has grown more confident in traveling around government-held areas as the army and its allies have won a series of victories.

An Islamic State evacuation convoy in eastern Syria that was blocked by US -led air strikes will head from government-held Sukhna towards the IS-held Deir al-Zor region, a commander in the pro-Syrian government military alliance said on Thursday.

Iraq objected to the shifting of the fighters to its border as it enters the final stages of an operation to clear ISIL from its territory with the help of a US-led global coalition against the extremist group.


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