The President of Syria is trying to make a “lucrative offer” to Trump, but the West seems to have placed its bets on the overthrow of the regime.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ordered the army to concentrate all forces in Damascus to protect the capital from the rebels. In his last desperate attempt to stay in power, Assad is trying to improve relations with the United States and President-elect Donald Trump through diplomatic intermediaries.
Bloomberg reports this, citing anonymous sources familiar with the situation.
The publication notes that Assad has essentially “ceded” most of the country to the rebels, who have launched a rapid offensive in just a few days and captured the major cities of Aleppo and Hama. Today, fighting is already taking place on the streets of Homs, and the rebel units are only 30 km from Damascus.
“As his remaining troops dig in, Syria's longtime ruler says [through intermediaries – ed.] that he is willing to make a deal that would allow him to retain power over the territory his army controls or guarantee him a green corridor to flee into exile,” the article says.
Sources say one of the offers Assad has made to the US through the United Arab Emirates is that Syria will end its cooperation with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group if the West helps stop the fighting.
Assad sent another message to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban via Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Ephraim II, saying that if the Islamist rebels win, Syria's Christian minority will face an existential threat to its existence. Syria's Christian community makes up about 10% of the country's 24 million people.
According to the patriarch's aide, Assad hopes the Hungarian prime minister will convey the danger to the new US president.
Russian jets based in Syria have begun airstrikes around Homs to try to halt the rebel advance. But, fearing that this aid will not be enough, Assad continues negotiations through unofficial channels.
Their main goal is to maintain control over part of the country and satisfy Turkey's demands for a political transition and the possible return of millions of Syrian refugees, who have become a serious problem for Ankara during the years of chaos in Syria.
According to the journalists' interlocutors, Assad is also proposing to adopt a new constitution and is even negotiating with the opposition, which is mostly in exile. However, it is difficult to say whether these efforts will bear fruit, since no force, either inside Syria or in the world, can fully control the situation at the moment.
“I don't think any external force has the leverage to change the course of events in Syria. At the moment, most bets are on the Assad regime not being able to hold on,” said Andreas Krieg, director of the British analytical company MENA Analytica.
Recall that Donald Trump said that the war in Syria does not concern the United States, and the conflict should be allowed to develop naturally. According to the elected US president, Russia will not help Syria either, since it has lost more than 600 thousand soldiers in the war against Ukraine.
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