Assad can stay on until war ends, says Britain
Louisa Loveluck The Syrian president can remain in power for as long as it takes to end the conflict, Britain’s Foreign Secretary conceded, even as the embattled dictator blamed the West for the crises thronging his country.
Philip Hammond said that the UK could accept Bashar al-Assad remaining as titular head of Syria for three years or more if it meant ending the conflict, but that the President would have to pledge not to run in any future election.
“If the price for doing that is that we have to accept that Assad will remain as titular head of state for a period of time, do I really care if that’s three days, three weeks, three years or even longer? I don’t think I do,” he said, speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester.
Hammond said that for any agreement on a managed political transition to be reached, Assad would have to give up control over Syria’s security apparatus. He added that there was no agreement with Moscow and Tehran on such a transition.
“The key is that there must be a transition — at the moment there is no agreement with the Russians and the Iranians even that there should be a transition,” he said.
Britain has always insisted that Assad cannot be a part of Syria’s longterm future, but that position appears to have softened in recent weeks.
As Russian warplanes bombed the rebel groups around Assad’s northwestern heartlands yesterday, the Syrian President described the West as “the biggest contributor” to terrorism there and said that the Russian intervention must succeed “or else the whole region will be destroyed”.
Moscow waded into Syria’s messy civil war last week, launching a military campaign to protect the regime’s northwestern heartland while claiming to target Isis (Islamic State), a force mainly concentrated in the east. “The alliance between Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran must succeed or else the whole region will be destroyed,” Assad said in an interview broadcast by Iranian state television, insisting they would achieve the “practical results” that the US-led anti-Isis coalition has not managed.
The Russian Defence Ministry said yesterday that its latest strikes had hit a jihadist training camp, disrupting control systems and supply lines. It was not possible to verify the claim.
In the northwestern province of Homs, residents said that air strikes had hit areas controlled by the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA). One activist said that most of the casualties were women and children.
Dozens of civilians have been killed or maimed in the Russian air campaign, including rescue workers. “The first targets of its [Russia’s] planes were the densely populated villages inhabited by unarmed villagers . . . in Homs,” said the Homs Liberation Movement, a faction of the FSA.— Telegraph Group Ltd An 18-year-old Palestinian man has been shot dead by Israeli soldiers during clashes in Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank, medics and Palestinian police sources say.
Huzeifa Othman Suleiman is the first Palestinian to be killed in a fresh outbreak of violent clashes in the West Bank after a Palestinian attacker killed two Israelis in Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday. Israeli police took the rare step of barring Palestinians from the Old River in Columbia was at its highest since 1936, she said.
Hurricane Joaquin had spared the US East Coast a direct hit but pummelled the Bahamas and is lashing Bermuda.
A ribbon of the hurricane’s tropical moisture led to two days of heavy rainstorms that caused so much misery in the Carolinas.
Along the Ashley River in Charleston, several streets remained blocked off to traffic. Knee-deep floodwaters covered intersections. “It’s the worst it’s been since [Hurricane] Hugo in 1989,” said Remley Campbell, 69, a financial adviser from Charleston.
Some parts of the state received City for two days after the fatal stabbing. The measure comes with Jerusalem on a high security alert after the attack, which also saw a child and a woman wounded.
Two ultra-Orthodox Jews, one of whom was an IDF soldier, were stabbed on their way to the Western Wall. They were named as Nehemia Lavi, 41, from Jerusalem and Aharon Bennett, 21, from the West Bank settlement of Beitar Illit. Bennett’s wife, 22, more than 50cm of rain in three days — “mind-boggling” amounts, according to the Weather Service — that has washed away roads, knocked down power lines and turned trickling streams into gushing whitewater that threatened to knock out bridges and buildings.
At times yesterday, as many as 7cm of rain fell in an hour. Television reports showed catastrophic scenes of rising water flooding homes and busi- was injured and remains in a serious condition in hospital, and their 2-yearold son suffered light wounds.
The perpetrator was named as Mohammad Halabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian law student from a village near Ramallah, West Bank. After stabbing the Israelis, he grabbed a pistol from one of the victims and opened fire into the crowd, police said. He was shot dead by police. Before the attack, Halabi posted a picture on Facebook nesses, people kayaking down streets transformed into rivers, and parking lots so flooded that the water almost swallowed cars whole.
The state’s National Guard was involved in some of the rescues, using its Black Hawk helicopters to run what it said were “multiple missions”.
Coastal flooding was also reported in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.
— Washington Post-Bloomberg of a student, Diaa Talhama, who was killed in the West Bank two weeks ago.
A few hours later, an Israeli teenager was injured in another stabbing in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian perpetrator was shot dead. Also, members of the extremist Jewish Lehava group sprayed tear gas into a Palestinian’s face, while other members stormed a cafe looking for “Arab employees”, Haaretz reported.
— Telegraph Group Ltd, AFP