Russia resisted Western pleas on Tuesday to help remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power despite escalating hostilities that have battered a UN peace mission.
“We believe that nobody has the right to decide for other nations who should be in power and who should not,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters after a G20 summit at the Mexican beach resort of Los Cabos.
“It is not changing the regime that is important, but that after changing the regime, which should be done constitutionally, violence is stopped and peace comes to the country,” he said.
US President Barack Obama said he told Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) on the sidelines of the summit that al-Assad could no longer remain in power after the massacres of large numbers of civilians.
“I wouldn’t suggest that at this point the United States and the rest of the international community are aligned with Russia and China ... but I do think they recognize the grave dangers of all out civil war,” Obama said.
However, French President Francois Hollande said Russia “is playing its role to permit a transition.”
“Those who are massacring their people today cannot play a role in the future of Syria,” he said.
Meanwhile, the head of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) told the UN Security Council of the intensifying violence in the country, but said the nearly 300 unarmed monitors were “morally obliged” to stay.
“We are going nowhere,” Major General Robert Mood told reporters after the closed meeting.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous reaffirmed the message.
“We have decided, for the time being, not to touch, not to modify, but rather to maintain the integrity of the mission,” he told reporters.
The future of UNSMIS is being discussed as various diplomatic initiatives have been launched on Syria and the mission’s current mandate ends on July 20, Ladsous added.
Highlighting the dangers faced by the nearly 300 unarmed monitors in Syria, Mood told the meeting that UN vehicles had been hit 10 times by “direct fire” and hundreds of times by “indirect fire.” He said nine UN vehicles had been hit in the past eight days alone.
The use of improvised explosive devices and snipers has increased, causing many of the mounting casualties, Mood told the envoys as his team struggles to shore up a ceasefire supposed to take effect from April 12.
However, he insisted the suspension of operations did not mean an “abandonment” of Syria. UNMIS was “morally obliged not to turn away” and “must redouble efforts,” Mood was quoted as saying.
Earlier UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the UN Security Council to put “sustained pressure” on al-Assad, saying he was “gravely concerned” about the rising death toll, a top aide said.
“A truly joint effort by the council, one that delivers unified and sustained pressure to demand compliance in full with the six-point plan is urgently needed,” Assistant UN Secretary-General Oscar Fernandez Taranco said. “Otherwise we may be reaching the day when it will be too late to stop the crisis spiraling out of control.”
In other developments, 28 soldiers and a Shiite Muslim cleric were among 39 people killed in violence across Syria yesterday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
At least 20 troops were killed in fierce clashes with rebel fighters in the northwestern province of Latakia, the Britain-based watchdog said.
Five rebels were also killed in the clashes that began late on Tuesday and continued through dawn yesterday in a region known as the Kurdish Mountain near the border with Turkey.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of