Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal
yesterday called for Syrian rebels to be given anti-tank and anti-aircraft
weapons to “level the playing field” in their fight to remove President Bashar
al-Assad.
“I’m not in government
so I don’t have to be diplomatic. I assume we’re sending weapons and if we were
not sending weapons it would be a terrible mistake on our part,” he said in a
televised debate at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos,
Switzerland.
Prince Turki, co-founder
of the King Faisal Foundation and board chairman of the King
Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, is the son of the late
King Faisal and brother of the kingdom’s foreign minister. He studied at Princeton,
Cambridge and Georgetown universities before serving in succession over the
years as adviser to royal court, intelligence chief, ambassador to the UK and
Ireland, and finally ambassador to the United States.
“You have to level the
playing field. Most of the weapons the rebels have come from captured Syrian
stocks and defectors bringing their weapons,” he said.
“What is needed are
sophisticated, high-level weapons that can bring down planes, can take out tanks
at a distance. This is not getting through.”
But Prince Turki said
foreign powers should have enough information on the many rebel brigades to
ensure weapons only reached non-extremist groups.
Extremists are flowing
into Syria from North Africa, Europe and other regions to fight with opposition
forces, he said.
“Stop the killing and
you won’t have these terrorists, they won’t have any place to go in Syria,” the
Saudi prince said. Their presence was predicted from day one in the event of a
prolonged crisis. The answer is to channel funds to “the good guys” among the
opposition.
"You can select the
good guys and give them these means and build their credibility," he said.
"Now they don't have the means, and the extremists have the means and are
getting the prestige."
“Sixty thousand people
have been killed already,” Prince Turki said. “Do we have to wait for
double or triple that number to die before Assad leaves?”
Pressed on the thorny
issue whether the opposition’s allies are sending weapons into Syria, Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “The Turkish people have helped the refugees
with their humanitarian needs and also the Syrian people to defend themselves
by the best means… The Syrian people know what we are doing, how we are
helping.”
Panelists agreed there
must be a political solution in Syria.
Syria has become a
“proxy war” with different countries trying to defend or impose their own
interests, said Ghassan Salamé, Dean of The Paris School of International
Affairs. Any solution could take many years unless one of two things happens,
he said. Either one side must prevail militarily, or a political solution must
be imposed on the various players from outside. “I don’t see another way out of
this,” he said.
“Europeans, Arabs, Chinese,
Russians: we’re all committing a crime by watching people in Syria die,” Salamé
said, warning the worst was yet to come if the battle for Damascus begins in
earnest. That is likely to be devastating and send many thousands more refugees
into Lebanon and Jordan.
Jordan’s Abdullah
Also speaking yesterday
in Davos during a panel appearance with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Jordan’s King
Abdullah warned, “Anyone who says that Bashar’s regime has got weeks to live
really doesn't know the reality on the ground."
“They still have
capability. ... So (I expect) a strong showing for at least the first half of
2013,” he said.
Nonetheless, fears are
growing Syria may implode as the protracted conflict gets nastier.
Any fragmentation of
the country into small states would be “catastrophic and something that we
would be reeling from for decades to come,” Abdullah said.
He also warned of the
threat of foreign jihadist fighters now in Syria.
Al-Qaeda has been
established there for the past year and is getting support “from certain
quarters,” the king said.
“They are a force to
contend with, so even if we got the best government into Damascus tomorrow, we
have at least two or three years of securing our borders from them coming
across and to clean them up,” he said.
Comparing the militant
threat with that seen in Afghanistan, Abdullah said: "The new Taliban we
are going to have to deal with will be in Syria.”
Abdullah appealed for
greater international help for more than 300,000 Syrian refugees who have
already fled over the border into Jordan and are suffering in the grip of a
cruel winter.
He also urged the
stockpiling of humanitarian supplies that could be taken across Syria's
borders, to try to keep people from leaving -- and to win hearts and minds.
“If these people start
to starve and they don't have fuel and electricity and water, and hospitals are
not running, that's when radicalization comes in and take advantage,” the king
said.
Henry Kissinger
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| Richard Nixon, Hafez Assad and Henry Kissinger (syrianhistory.com) |
Also touching
on Syria in his wide-ranging address to business leaders at the Forum in Davos earlier
on Thursday was the Nixon Administration’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who
brokered the Syria-Israel disengagement agreement with Bashar’s father Hafez
Assad in March 1974.
Kissinger called
on Washington and Moscow to work together to solve the Syria crisis.
He counseled
“an American-Russian understanding as a first step towards defining what the
objective is,” adding: “The Syrian problem would best be dealt with
internationally by Russia and America not making it a contest of national
interest.”
The Syrian
conflict, initially seen as a fight of democracy against dictatorship, has
transformed into a conflict between various ethnic groups, leaving the international
community with a dilemma. “The outside world finds that if it intervenes
militarily, it will be in the middle of a vast ethnic conflict; and if it
doesn’t intervene militarily, it will be caught in a humanitarian tragedy,”
said Kissinger.
While a number
of outcomes are possible –- Assad staying in office, a total “Sunnite” victory,
or an emergence of a loose federation of various ethnic groups –- what is clear
is that “the more the outside world competes, the worse it gets,” he said.
John Kerry
John Kerry, the
incoming secretary of state who met several times over the years with Bashar,
did not mention Syria in his opening statement at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee
on Thursday.
But when pressed by Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., about getting more directly involved in helping the
Syrian rebels, Kerry said he needs time to understand the situation better.
McCain, part of a
bipartisan group of senators which just got back from a trip to the Middle East
and visited Syrian refugees camps, told Kerry they feel “an anger and
frustration” and believe the United States is indifferent to their suffering.
One Syrian teacher told
McCain and the other senators, “This next generation of children will take
revenge on those that did not help them.”
McCain added, “We are
sowing the wind in Syria and we are going to reap the whirlwind.”
He said, “We can do a
lot more, without putting boots on the ground” – such as a no-fly zone – and he
complained that “all I get, frankly, from the (Obama) administration is the
fall of Assad is, quote, ‘inevitable.’ I agree, but what about what happens in
the meantime?”
Another member of the
delegation that toured the Middle East, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., complained to
Kerry that U.S. humanitarian aid intended for Syrian refugees “has not reached
the people on the ground.”
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| Kerry and McCain at the confirmation hearing |
In response to both
Coons and McCain, Kerry said “if you have a complete implosion of the state” in
Syria after Assad’s fall, it would greatly increase the risk that Assad’s
chemical weapons arsenal would fall into the wrong hands.
Asked about the personal
bond he once had with Assad, Kerry said there
was a moment where Syria reached out to the West but that the moment has long
passed.
“Sometimes there are
moments where you may be able to get something done in foreign policy, and if
the moment somehow doesn’t ripen correctly or get seized, you miss major
opportunities,” he said.
"History
caught up to us. That never happened. And it's now moot, because he (Assad) has
made a set of judgments that are inexcusable, that are reprehensible, and I
think is not long for remaining as the head of state in Syria," the
senator said. "I think the time is ticking."
Kerry also said: “We
need to change Bashar Assad’s calculation. Right now President Assad doesn’t
think he’s losing -- and the opposition thinks it is winning.”
Kerry said the goal of
U.S. policy is a peaceful transition to a new government.
He said he hoped to
confer with the Russians and with others and “increase the readiness of
President Assad to see that the die is cast, the handwriting is on the wall….”
“I don’t want
inquisitiveness or curiosity about what possibilities might exist with the
Russians to be translated into optimism. I don’t have optimism. I have hope,”
the senator said.
Coons told Kerry, “We
frankly face a very narrow window to make a difference on the ground in support
of the opposition.”
“I get it,” Kerry
answered, but he said he was worried about who would control the country if
Assad were forced out of power.
Laurent Fabius
In Paris, French
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in his annual New Year's
address to the press there was no sign the
Syria war was going to end anytime soon, in contrast to his prediction last
month that the end was near for Assad.
"Things
are not moving. The solution we had hoped for, and by that I mean the fall of
Bashar and the arrival of the [opposition’s National] Coalition to power, has
not happened," he said.
France
was the first to recognize the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and
Opposition Forces as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.
Fabius
told RFI radio in December "the end is nearing" for Assad. On
Thursday, he said international mediation and discussions about the crisis were
not getting anywhere.
"There
are no recent positive signs," he said.
He
said National Coalition leaders and representatives of some 50 nations and
organizations would meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how to fulfill previous
commitments. He did not elaborate.
