The US has warned rebels in southern Syria that they should not expect military intervention if government troops launch an assault against them, a rebel commander said yesterday.
Russian-backed government forces are preparing an offensive to retake Syria’s southern provinces of Daraa and Sweida, still mostly held by rebels who had been backed by the US for years.
The US warning to the heads of Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups, contained in an Arabic-language message seen by reporters, came as Syrian troops stepped up air strikes on the southern provinces.
Photo: AFP
“We must clarify our position: we understand that you must make a decision [to fight] based on your interests, the interests of your people and your faction as you see them,” the message read.
“You should not base your decision on an assumption or expectation of military intervention from our side,” it said.
The US did not immediately confirm the letter’s contents.
Syrian regime forces on Saturday made their first gains on the ground against rebel fighters in Daraa Province after several days of intensified airstrikes, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It also reported that Russia late on Saturday carried out its first air strike on Daraa since brokering a truce there last year.
That “de-escalation” deal for southwest Syria was agreed with the US and Jordan and initially brought some respite to the area, though violations continued.
Those same powers are in talks now to reach a negotiated settlement for the south that could head off a bloody regime assault.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called for “an immediate end to the current military escalation” while US Ambassador to the UN Nikky Haley urged Moscow to pressure its Syria to respect the ceasefire.
“We in the US government understand the difficult circumstances you are now facing, and we are still advising the Russians and the Syrian regime not to conduct any military action that will violate the de-escalation zone in southwest Syria,” the US message to rebels said.
The opposition commander who received it said it was not in response to a request for help by anti-regime factions.
“We knew anyway that they weren’t going to intervene, so we weren’t disappointed,” he said. “The letter’s contents mean that America will not be able to help the south — in other words, they are saying ‘you’re on your own.’”
Throwing in Russia’s full military weight in the campaign to regain southern Syria will weaken the ability of mainstream rebel groups to withstand relentless bombing on civilian areas that forced their compatriots in other areas to submit to surrender deals.
Jordan said it was engaged in intensive diplomacy with Washington and Moscow to preserve the zone and prevent a wider confrontation.
Additional reporting by Reuters
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS