DAMASCUS:
Syria will not negotiate with terrorists to end the conflict on their terms, no matter how hard the West tries to present armed gangs as grassroots political opposition, the country’s President Bashar Assad told Spanish News Agency EFE.
The problem, Assad says, lies with the fact that large portion of armed fighters and terror gangs in
Syria are foreign mercenaries, which the US and their allies in the Gulf region are craving to include in the negotiation process.
“Opposition is a political term, not a military term. So, talking about the concept is different from the practice, because so far, we’ve been seeing that some countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United States, and some western countries wanted the terrorist groups to join these negotiations.
They want the Syrian government to negotiate with the terrorists, something I don’t think anyone would accept in any country,” Assad told.
“To solve this problem is to stop the flood of terrorists, especially through Turkey to
Syria and to Iraq, and of course we have to stop the flowing of money…to those terrorists through Turkey, and the armaments,” the Syrian president said.”(Syria Times)