Report: Syrian President, Ex-Opposition Leader Likely to Meet in Moscow Early Next Year
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former President of the National Coalition for Syrian Opposition Forces Moaz Al-Khatib will probably meet in Russia in near future, Arab media reports said. “Russia is currently preparing the grounds for a meeting between President Assad and a group of Syrian opposition forces, including Al-Khatib, in Moscow in 2015,” the London-based Arabic-language Al-Arab newspaper quoted an American diplomat as saying on Wednesday.
The US diplomat noted that Al-Khatib will represent a group of Syrian opposition forces in the upcoming meeting with President Assad. He told the Al-Arab newspaper that Manaf Tlass, a former Brigadier General of the Syrian Republican Guard, will also attend the meeting.
Last month, Al-Khatib confessed that his opposition to the Damascus government has been a grave mistake, saying that President Assad has been fighting against the terrorists. “I acknowledge that I have made a mistake in the past as I imagined that the western and Arab countries as well as Turkey wanted to help Syria and its people,” Turkish news website Ulusal quoted Khatib as saying on his account on a social network.
He wrote that the so-called Friends of Syria are actually the enemies of Syria and terrorists are cooperating with them to destroy Syria. “I have come to the conclusion that the Syrian government is fighting against the terrorists; it is paying salary to its employees in different parts, supplies electricity and do things that show it is thinking of the people,” Khatib said.
Moaz Al-Khatib is a former president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. He is also a former prayers imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs and terrorists against both the army and civilians.
The unrest, which took in terrorist groups from across Europe, the Middle-East and North Africa, has transpired as one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
As the foreign-backed insurgency in Syria continues without an end in sight, the US government has boosted its political and military support to Takfiri extremists.
