US
Syria policy: signs of shift as Trump son meets pro-Russia Damascus
figure
The
president-elect’s son reportedly met with Randa Kassis, a Syrian
politician who strongly supports Russian intervention, in Paris last
month
Julian Borger in
Washington and Raya Jalabi in New York
Wednesday 23 Nov
A meeting in Paris
between Donald Trump’s son and a Syrian politician with strong ties
to Russia has strengthened expectations that the new US
administration will side with Moscow in the conflict.
The meeting Donald
Trump Jr attended at the Paris Ritz on 11 October, reported in the
Wall Street Journal, was co-hosted by Randa Kassis, who runs a Syrian
group portrayed as the “patriotic opposition” by Moscow. Kassis
is widely viewed as pro-regime by many dissidents, because she
advocates political transition in cooperation with the Syrian leader,
Bashar al-Assad, and because of her strong support of Russian
intervention.
“Russia intervened
to save the country, for the sake of Syria,” Kassis said on
al-Jazeera programme Opposite Direction on Tuesday. “The problem is
that you don’t know the Russians, you don’t understand the
Russians ... you just accuse the Russians of being against the
opposition but you need to understand them.”
Bassam Barabandi, a
former Syrian diplomat who defected and is now a Washington-based
dissident said that Kassis’s organisation does not have widespread
support. “It is really her and a group of her friends,” he said.
“No one else in Syria recognises her as an opposition except the
regime.”
Her husband, Fabien
Baussart, is a French businessman who runs a small thinktank in Paris
called the Centre for Political and Foreign Affairs, and has strong
commercial ties to Kazakhstan and Russia. Baussart introduced Kassis,
a former Damascus socialite, to Sergey Lavrov, according to Joseph
Bahout, a Syrian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
“She is a good
friend of Lavrov, and he invited her and several others to Moscow and
they created what is known – with a certain irony – as the
‘Moscow opposition’,”Bahout said. “The Russians in their
cynicism tried to impose these people as an opposition delegation to
the peace talks in Geneva. But of course the rest of the opposition
all objected.”
Kassis recently
posted comments on her Facebook page about the meeting, saying:
“Syria’s opposition got hope that political process will move
forward and Russia and the United States will reach accord on the
issue of the Syrian crisis, because of Trump’s victory. Such hope
and belief is the result of my personal meeting with Donald Trump
Junior in Paris in October.”
“I succeeded to
pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we
can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the
United States on Syria,” Kassis said in her Facebook posting.
Throughout his
campaign, Trump praised Russia and the Syrian regime for “fighting
Isis”, although very little of the war effort of either government
is focused on the Islamic State movement. It is mostly aimed at areas
held by other opposition groups, and their bombing of those areas
have been responsible for the great majority of the civilian
casualties, according to human rights groups.
Earlier this month,
Assad appeared to give the president-elect a cautious endorsement,
saying Trump would be a “natural ally” if he fulfills his pledge
to fight “terrorists”.
In an interview with
the New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said: “I have a different
view on Syria than everybody else.”
He gave no specifics
other than to say his view was opposed to Republican senator, Lindsey
Graham, who has proposed tougher action to back some opposition
groups, defend civilians and confront Russia and the Syrian regime.
He said he had very strong ideas on Syria, but would only discuss
them off the record.
In the same New York
Times interview, Trump also suggested that his son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, might serve as an envoy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That suggestion and his son’s attendance at the Paris meeting have
reinforced earlier impressions that he would rely heavily on personal
and business connections in foreign policy, using family members as
go-betweens despite their lack of experience.
Members of Trump’s
entourage also came under fire from a former counter-terrorist
official on Wednesday for their lobbying on behalf of an Iranian
rebel group, the Mujahidin e-Khalq (MeK), that was on the state
department foreign terrorist organisation list from 1997 until 2012.
Daniel Benjamin, the
coordinator for counter-terrorism in the state department from 2009
to 2012, accused former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani and former
ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, both candidates for high office in
the new administration, of accepting lavish fees from an organisation
that had in the past been responsible for the deaths of American
citizens and other civilians.
“You can tell a
lot about potential Cabinet nominees by the terrorist group they
shill for,” Benjamin wrote in Politico on Wednesday. “The MeK has
plenty of American blood on its hands, as well as that of thousands
of Iranians killed while the group was a strike force serving Saddam
Hussein in the 1980s and ‘90s.”
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