WASHINGTON/QUNEITRA, SYRIA:No policy changes came out of last week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday, adding he had also not been given new direction on Syria.
“I have talked immediately after the Helsinki summit — both the (White House) chief of staff and the national security adviser, called me,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. “There have been no policy changes that have come out of it.”
The Syrian opposition’s chief negotiator, Nasr Al-Hariri, called for a renewal of UN-brokered peace talks while acknowledging “significant military losses” by rebel forces.
The fighters have “not lost the war” ravaging his country since 2011, the head of the Syrian Negotiation Commission insisted, playing down the likelihood of an all-out regime assault on the last major opposition bastion of Idlib in northwestern Syria.
Hariri took aim at the international community for having allowed regime ally Russia to determine the course of the war since its 2015 military intervention.
“By international consensus, military and non-military support for the opposition has been stopped, as well as political support to a great extent,” he said in Riyadh.
Separately, dozens of Syrian pro-regime fighters and civilians on Friday celebrated their return to the abandoned town of Quneitra close to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights after opposition fighters quit the area.
Fighters from Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham had held Quneitra city and the adjacent frontier with a UN-controlled buffer zone, which has remained sealed for decades. The fighters were bussed out of the area last week to Idlib, after rejecting a Russia-brokered deal to hand over territory to the regime.
