US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told CNN in an interview to be aired Sunday she sees no possible political solution in Syria as long as President Bashar al-Assad remains in power.
“There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” Haley stated. “It just – if you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad [in charge].”
On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov insisted that it was the US airstrike was impeding his own government’s attempts to resolve the crisis in Syria. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that “Sergey Lavrov stressed the inadmissibility of such act of aggression which can only worsen the tense situation and undermine Russia’s […] efforts towards peace settlement of the Syrian crisis.” The foreign also suggested “the importance of an objective and unbiased investigation of all the circumstances of the tragic developments in Khan Sheikhoun and of the use of chemical weapons by militants from terrorist organizations in the past.”
Stunning and brazen, naturally, but still better than President Putin’s Friday condemnation of the US airstrike as “aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of international law.”
Name “Ukraine” mean anything to you, Mr. President?
Ambassador Haley insisted that a regime change is going to take place, because “all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria.”
OK, so her grammar is a bit unrehearsed, but the main thing is Assad will, at some point, cease to take place.
When asked if Trump would order more strikes, Haley said, “If he needs to do more, he will do more. So, really, now what happens depends on how everyone responds to what happened in Syria, and make sure that we start moving towards a political solution, and we start finding peace in that area.”
Meanwhile, according to Syrian monitors, the residents of the same Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun which on Tuesday suffered the chemical attacks on Friday night and into Saturday morning were bombarded once again by the Syrian air force. Incidentally, the Syrian Russian-made Sukhoi jets took off from al-Shayrat airbase, the one destroyed just the other day by President Trump.
So, things stay basically the same.
