Geneva 2 meaningless unless all parties, including ‘beheading jihadist’ attend talks
Geneva talks are set to fail unless the armed Syrian opposition, including radical jihadists, as well as all the regional players, including Iran and Hezbollah, attend the negotiations, journalist Pepe Escobar told RT.
RT:The rebel infighting adds another
dimension to the Syrian conflict - how is it affecting the wider
peace efforts in Syria? Is it adding another complication?
Pepe Escobar: It is, because there is no sense
of having a Geneva 2 if you don’t have representatives of
beheading jihadists at the table. And we know that this 30,000 or
so army being more or less assembled by Bandar Bush and his
acolytes across the Middle East, these are the real actors on the
ground. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Jabhat
al-Nusra, al-Qaeda or CIA-al-Qaeda linked or not – these are the
people who are doing the war, who are fighting the war and who
are still being weaponized.
The Free Syrian Army as we understood it until a few months ago,
it does not exist anymore. It was controlled by Qatar. Qatar is
not a player in Syria anymore. Saudi Arabia is. If Saudi Arabia
would be at the table in Geneva 2, Iran would have to be at the
table as well. No preconditions. And nothing like this is going
to happen in Geneva 2. So we’re going to have a talk fest and it
will have no influence on the war on the ground in the long run.
RT:Will any of the opposition groups be
there in any shape or form? Any representatives to talk to on the
other side, because any talks are better than no talks,
surely?
PE: Of course, any talk is better than no talk. The
thing is that the opposition, the armed opposition from the very
beginning, their number one precondition was – Assad out. It
never happened and it won’t happen.
So if Assad stays, the Syrian government is part of the talks and
the armed and the unarmed opposition should be part of the talks.
This includes what we call the Paris gang, those exiles who
control part of the unarmed opposition in Paris. Some of them
will be in Geneva, some will not.
But we won’t have the armed opposition in full and this is the
most important thing. So whatever you decide…if you have a
roadmap out of Geneva 2 and it does not account for the real
facts on the ground, which we see every day, and the expansion of
the war to Lebanon and across the border between Syria and Iraq,
it will be just a talk fest.
RT:Will Iran be present at the talks?
PE: We don’t know, we still don’t know, because there is
still no official confirmation from the Iranian foreign ministry
that they will be there.
RT:What can they offer anyways?
PE: Look, we have more or less concrete evidence that
some of the Revolutionary Guard Units helped the Assad
government, especially reconquering parts of the Hama corridor
between Damascus and Aleppo. And of course we know that Hezbollah
has also helped. And we know that Hezbollah is guarding the
Lebanese-Syrian border.
So Hezbollah should be at the table. Representatives of the IRGC
should also be at the table. They are players on the ground as
much as are all the different factions weaponized by Turkey, by
Jordanians, by the CIA, especially by the Bandar Bush, by the
Saudis.
RT:Syria's Foreign Minister reportedly sent
a letter to the UN Secretary General, demanding that the
countries supporting terrorist groups stop training and funding
them. Will that be a centre issue at the upcoming conference? Is
that going to be up for discussion or not?
PE: We still don’t know. And even the UN… We
don’t have a UN mechanism… Do we have the UN as overarching
establisher of peace in Syria? Not at all. Lakhdar Brahimi and
everybody else is just one more player among other squabbling
players.
It is a very sorry state of affairs because if we had the US
Secretary of State John Kerry for instance being really forceful
in having all these people controlled by the Turks, by the Saudis
and even by the Qataris, some reverence of some Qatari adjutant,
let’s put it this way on the table as well – and this is what the
Russians have been saying all along via Foreign Minister Lavrov –
we would have a meaningful discussion. For the moment, there is
no indication that this would be a meaningful discussion.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.