War targets resistance axis: Bashar Al-Assad

DAMASCUS

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (R) meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi in Damascus. Al-Assad says the war is targeting the ‘resistance axis.’ AFP photo

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Iran’s foreign minister yesterday that the war engulfing Syria is targeting not just it but the “resistance axis,” state news agency SANA reported.

Al-Assad’s regime, Iran and the powerful Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah refer to themselves as a “resistance axis” in their common opposition to Israel. “The ongoing battle is targeting the whole of the resistance axis, not just Syria,” Assad told Iran’s visiting Ali Akbar Salehi, according to Agence France-Presse.

Meanwhile, Assad said “Syria has shown openness in dealing with all initiatives put forward to find a solution to the crisis. The key to any initiative’s success is the sincerity of the intentions behind it.” Earlier in the day, Salehi said the solution to the conflict “lies only with Syria and within the Syrian family, in partnership with international and regional organizations.” Salehi said the country was “facing a problem, and we hope that this problem can be solved as soon as possible.”

Salehi’s call for an end to fighting came at a meeting in Cairo on Sept. 17 of the Syria “contact group,” to which Iran, as well as Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia belong.

Tehran, a staunch ally of the regime in Damascus, is also proposing the four countries dispatch observers to Syria in an effort to quell the violence.