‘EU should help push Iran out of Syria’

brussels — 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 on Thursday.

Nasr Hariri of the Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC) spoke in the EU political hub Brussels as Assad declared separately that US forces should leave Syria because people in the Middle East were tired of foreign invasions.

Hariri pushed back against Assad’s comments, stressing that Russia and Iran had been fighting on behalf of Assad in the Syrian war, helping him retake considerable territory from rebels. Hariri 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.

The EU is now scrambling to keep the deal alive because it sees it as a key element of international security.

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.

The role of Iran is getting bigger and bigger, at the expense of our people. So we are supporting any international mechanism that could limit the influence of Iran in the region Nasr Hariri, Syrian Negotiation Commission