Future can’t include Assad: Trudeau
Bashar Assad’s days as president of Syria are numbered, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested Monday as the spectre of escalating conflict in the Middle East loomed large amid the lingering ghosts of two world wars.
The way forward in Syria can’t include Assad, whose recent chemical attack against his own people were abetted by those countries - Russia and Iran - that have allowed him to remain in power, Trudeau told a news conference.
“There is no question that anyone who is guilty of the types of war crimes against innocents, against children, that Assad and his regime are needs to be held to account,” he said during a visit to Juno Beach to commemorate Canada’s Second World War dead.
“We need to move as quickly as possible towards peace and stability in Syria that does not involve Bashar al-Assad.”
Trudeau was, however, noncommittal when it came to the question of how to remove Assad from power, and whether Russia should be punished for supporting him.
Canada remains open to imposing new sanctions against Russia in concert with its allies, Trudeau said, but Russia must also be part of the solution for bringing peace to Syria.
“Countries that have been supportive of the Assad regime bear some of the responsibility for the chemical attacks on innocents,” he said.
“And those countries must also be part of the solution as we hold the Assad regime to account and as we move tangibly forward as an international community to ending this conflict in Syria.”
The remarks about one of the world’s current hot spots capped two days of overseas commemorations for Canadian soldiers killed in the two world wars.
On Sunday, Trudeau was on hand for commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, before flying to Juno to pay homage to Canada’s role in D-Day on June 6, 1944, during the Second World War.
It was at Juno that 14,000 Canadian soldiers came ashore under heavy machine-gun and artillery fire to establish a beachhead for the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, of which 340 would die.
“The men who fought in 1944 were carrying the legacy of those who risked their lives at Vimy Ridge in 1917,” Trudeau said after walking the beach with his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and their son Xavier.