EU ‘should pressure Iran’ in Syria
Syrian opposition leader says Iran has more than 100,000 fighters on the ground
The US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal opens the way to raising pressure on Tehran to stop its military support for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and leave the country, a Syrian opposition leader said yesterday.
Nasr Hariri of the Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC) said there were now up to 100,000 Iranian or Iran-affiliated fighters in the country.
“The role of Iran is getting bigger and bigger, at the expense of our people,” Hariri said. “So we are supporting any international mechanism that could limit the influence of Iran in the region in general, and in our country in particular.”
“We cannot separate one from another, the [Iranian] nuclear programme from Tehran’s missile programme and Iran’s malign behaviour in our region,” he said.
Earlier in May, US President Donald Trump walked away from the 2015 international nuclear accord under which world powers lifted some economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on its disputed atomic energy programme.
But some EU states also share Trump’s anger with Iranian military involvement across the Middle East, including in Yemen, and would want to limit Tehran’s missile capabilities as well.
Hariri had talks with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini about the matter yesterday.
“While Iran and Iranian militias are present in our country, there will not be a political, negotiated solution. There will not be a solution while these foreign partners are there. We are looking for ways to force Iran out of Syria,” he said.
With Moscow and Tehran behind him, Al Assad now seems unassailable in a war that has killed half a million people, uprooted around six million inside Syria and driven another five million abroad as refugees, including to the EU.
But Hariri said three years of deepening Russian military intervention were still not enough to secure a decisive victory for Al Assad and without Russia Al Assad would lose.“Rumours that the regime has won the war are not true,” he said.
Rumours that Al Assad has won the war were not true and without Russia he would lose, Hariri says.