Syrian opposition recognized by U.S.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States would formally recognize a coalition of Syrian opposition groups as that country’s legitimate representative, intensifying the pressure on President Bashar Assad to give up his bloody struggle to stay in power.

Obama’s announcement, in an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News on the eve of a meeting in Morocco of the Syrian opposition leaders and their supporters, was widely expected. But it marks a new phase of U.S. engagement in a bitter, nearly two-year-long conflict that has claimed at least 40,000 lives, threatened to destabilize the region and defied all outside attempts to end it.

The announcement puts Washington’s political imprimatur on a once-disparate band of opposition groups, which have coalesced, under pressure from the United States and its allies, to develop what U.S. officials say is a credible transitional plan to govern Syria if Assad is forced out.

Moreover, it draws an even sharper line between those elements of the opposition that the United States champions and those it rejects. The Obama administration coupled its recognition with the designation hours earlier of a militant Syrian rebel group, Al Nusra Front, as a foreign terrorist organization, affiliated with al-Qaida.

“Not everybody who is participating on the ground in fighting Assad are people that we are comfortable with,” Obama said in an interview on the ABC program 20/20. “There are some who I think have adopted an extremist agenda, an antiU.S. agenda.”

But Obama praised the opposition, known formally as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, for what he said was its inclusiveness, its openness to various ethnic and religious groups, and its ties to local councils involved in fighting against Assad’s security forces.

“At this point we have a well-organized-enough coalition — opposition coalition that is representative — that we can recognize them as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people,” he said.

For some experts on Syria, however, the question was whether Obama’s move was too little, too late. Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have previously recognized the Syrian opposition. And the move does nothing to change the military equation inside Syria, where Assad has clung to power despite gains by rebel fighters.

Obama notably did not commit himself to providing arms to the rebels he is recognizing or to supporting them militarily with airstrikes or the establishment of a no-fly zone, a stance that has led to a rise of anti-American sentiment about many of the rebels.

Obama’s move does not go so far as to confer on the opposition the legal authority of a state. It does not, for example, recognize the opposition’s right to gain access to Syrian government money, take over the Syrian Embassy in Washington or enter into binding diplomatic commitments.

It is also unclear to what extent the move might influence the situation inside Syria, where the pace of the fighting appears to have intensified. A senior U.S. official who is attending the meeting in Morocco said Tuesday none of the rebel military commanders from the Free Syrian Army would be attending the meeting Wednesday.