Syria assails French for backing rebels
CAIRO — The Syrian government on Sunday accused France of “schizophrenia” for pledging to support a peaceful resolution to the uprising against President Bashar Assad and simultaneously aiding the armed groups driving it. Meanwhile, a French doctor returning from a rebelcontrolled hospital raised new alarms about the presence of foreign Islamist militants in Syria.
Days after the French government said that it would provide humanitarian and reconstruction assistance directly to the rebels controlling five Syrian cities, a spokesman for the Syrian government accused France of undermining the first trip to the region by the new U.N. envoy charged with negotiating peace, Lakhdar Brahimi.
“On the one hand, it supports Brahimi’s mission, while at the same time it makes statements demonstrating that it supports the militarization of the crisis in Syria,” the Syrian spokesman, Jihad Makdessi, said of the French government in an interview with The Associated Press. “The only way to make Brahimi’s mission a success is the cooperation of all parties to enable him to bring about calmness and then the political process.”
Western leaders and the Syrian rebels say the Assad government expressed similar support for peace proposals of the previous envoy, Kofi Annan, but in fact failed to curb its military campaign to wipe out the opposition. Mr. Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, quit in frustration. And the Assad government has since ruled out any talks with the Syrian rebels, dismissing them as foreign agents acting against Syria.
In Paris, a French doctor who just returned from a twoweek medical mission to a rebel-controlled hospital in the battleground of Aleppo said he was surprised by the number of militants from outside Syria who had joined the fight in the goal of establishing an Islamist government — one of the concerns that has deterred Western governments from supplying stronger aid to the armed opposition.
The doctor, Jacques Beres, a 71-year-old surgeon who is known for missions to war zones and who is a co-founder of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, said in an interview with Reuters that he had treated about 40 injured patients a day and that 60 percent were rebel fighters, half of whom were from outside Syria.
“It’s really something strange to see,” he said, according to Reuters. “They are directly saying that they aren’t interested in Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards and set up an Islamic state with Shariah law to become part of the world emirate.”
“Some of them were French and were completely fanatical about the future,” he added, according to Reuters.
Dr. Beres said the high proportion of foreign Islamist fighters was a sharp contrast to his impressions on earlier trips to Syria this spring, to makeshift clinics in the cities of Idlib and Homs.
Activists and rebel fighters interviewed over the Internet consistently describe far lower numbers of foreign fighters and Islamist militants among the opposition.
Dr. Beres said the Syrian government bombing appeared indiscriminate and that the death toll was far higher than reports had previously indicated; those reports have put the number of dead at more than 21,000.