BICOM

The UN’s deputy Syria envoy confirmed yesterday that the Syrian Government will attend the UN-sponsored peace talks in Vienna next week. On Tuesday, the Syrian opposition announced it would also be attending the talks.

The last round of UN-backed Syria peace talks were concluded in mid-December in Geneva. Yesterday’s announcement followed US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s address to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on Wednesday night, in which he laid out the administration’s new Syria policy.

The Secretary of State said the US plans to keep US forces in northern Syria indefinitely to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and counter the influence of Iran. The US currently has 2,000 soldiers in Syria, located at the al-Tanaf base near the Syria-Iraq-Jordan triangle.

Tillerson presented five specific steps that are required for the US to stop “remaining engaged” in Syria. First, he said ISIS and al Qaeda must “suffer an enduring defeat”. Second, the underlying conflict must be resolved through the UN-led political process prescribed in UN Security Council Resolution 2254, and a stable, unified and independent Syria emerge. Third, Iranian influence in Syria must be diminished, their dream of an Iranian land corridor denied, and Syria’s neighbours need to be secure from all threats emanating from Syria. Fourth, conditions need to be created so that “refugees and IDPs [internally displaced people] can begin to safely and voluntarily return to Syria”. And fifth, that Syria is “free of weapons of mass destruction”.

Tillerson said the US remained committed to seeing President Bashar al-Assad step down from power and would refuse to normalise diplomatic relations with Syria or provide reconstruction funds as “tools of pressure” to force Assad to go.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called Mr Tillerson’s speech on Syria a “great statement of US leadership”.

Syrian opposition member Hadi al-Bahra welcomed Mr Tillerson’s announcement but urged more concrete details. “This is the first time Washington has said clearly it has US interests in Syria that it is ready to defend,” Bahra told Reuters. The Assad government said that the American military presence on Syrian land is “illegal, a flagrant violation of international law, and an attack on national sovereignty”.