“Saudi Arabia is sending fighter jets and soldiers to a military base in Turkey ahead of a ground assault on Syria, reports suggest”

February 14, 2016 in World

The remarks came after world actors convened on Thursday in Munich and agreed to a plan to “cease hostilities” in Syria within a week and dramatically ramp up humanitarian access in the war-ravaged country.

Appearing at a security conference in Munich a day after diplomats secured a deal to work toward the temporary truce and to speed deliveries of humanitarian aid to besieged Syrians, Sergey Lavrov indicated that Russian Federation remains deeply suspicious of US intentions.

The conflict, reshaped by Russia’s intervention last September, has gone into an even higher gear since the United Nations sought to revive peace talks.

“This working group will meet tomorrow in Geneva”, said Kerry.

“If the coalition should decide to deploy special forces in the fight against IS in Syria, Saudi-Arabia will be ready to participate”, he said, using the initials IS to refer to Islamic State.

“Clearly the Syrian president is speaking from a position of strength”, said Khodr. “In general, the Raqqa front is open… starting in the direction of the Tabqa area”, the source said.

Syria’s president Bashar Al Assad has vowed to retake the entire country but warned it could take a “long time”, as global pressure grows for a ceasefire.

Mr Lavrov said that Moscow would not stop its campaign of air strikes because the deal did not cover Isis, the jihadist group that holds territory across Syria and Iraq, or Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate which fights alongside less hardline rebel groups across much of Syria.

World powers all say they support a “political transition”, but there has been disagreement for years over whether that requires Assad to leave power, as Western countries have been demanding in vain since 2011. He said this week that the government’s goal was to recapture all of Syria, though he said this could take time.

Government offensives around Aleppo have sent tens of thousands of people fleeing towards the Turkish border. Regional Kurdish forces supported by Washington are also fighting Islamic State in Raqqa province.

However US Defence Secretary Ash Carter told the BBC’s Jonathan Beale it remained to be seen whether Russian Federation would implement the agreement.

Saudi Arabia is sending fighter jets and soldiers to a military base in Turkey ahead of a ground assault on Syria, reports suggest.

Saudi Arabia’s soldiers will arrive in Incirlik, Adana, near the Syrian border shortly, but numbers have not been confirmed.

“They would ask ‘why should I come back?”

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday in Munich there was no need to scare anyone with a ground operation in Syria.

However, two militant commanders told Reuters on Friday that they have received “excellent quantities” of ground-to-ground missiles with a range of 20 kilometers (12 miles) from foreign supporters in recent days to help confront the government offensive in Aleppo.

‘If we have such a strategy, then Turkey and Saudi Arabia may launch an operation from the land’. The vetted groups have been a regular target of the Russian air strikes.

Some of these groups have received military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency

http://leadercall.com/2016/02/no-bashar-al-assad-in-the-future-says-saudi-foreign-minister/

Categories: Escalation / Destabilization Conflict