ANSD : Riyadh says open to sending troops to Syria

SAT 20 - 4 - 2024

Date: Apr 18, 2018
Source: The Daily Star

Riyadh says open to sending troops to Syria

RIYADH/WASHINGTON: Saudi Arabia would be prepared to send troops into Syria as part of the U.S.-led coalition if a decision was taken to widen it, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department said the United States has information that both chlorine and sarin nerve gas were used in an April 7 alleged chemical attack on the Syrian town of Douma and denied claims that inspectors from the global chemical weapons watchdog had entered the site by late Tuesday.

Syrian state media had reported earlier in the day that international inspectors entered Douma, after they had waited for days in the capital for permission from Syrian and Russian authorities.

In Riyadh, Jubeir said his country had expressed its readiness while Barack Obama was U.S. president to send ground forces into Syria if the United States were to add an on-the-ground component to the coalition fighting Daesh (ISIS) insurgents.

“We are in discussion with the U.S. and have been since the beginning of the Syrian crisis about sending forces into Syria,” Jubeir told a news conference in Riyadh with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Jubeir was responding to a question about a Wall Street Journal report that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to assemble an Arab force to replace the U.S. military contingent in Syria. “There are discussions regarding ... what kind of force needs to remain in eastern Syria and where that force would come from, and those discussions are ongoing,” Jubeir said.

One U.S. official told Reuters the United States is looking at what forces might be able to follow on in areas of Syria formerly under Daesh control, should the United States leave or reduce its force dramatically, although no decisions have been made to do this.

Trump said he wants to bring U.S. troops home from Syria but has not set a timeline, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday, two days after Western allies bombed Syrian targets over a suspected chemical weapons attack by government forces, which activist say killed 40 people.

Before the joint military strikes took place, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman had said that the kingdom, a key U.S. ally, could take part in military action in Syria.

Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Damascus on the day of the Western strikes but had not been allowed to enter Douma. France and the United States appeared to question the purpose of such a mission, warning that any incriminating evidence had likely been removed by this point.

In an impassioned defense to the European Parliament Tuesday, France’s President Emmanuel Macron admitted that Saturday’s strikes had been a more political than military decision.

“Three countries have intervened, and let me be quite frank, quite honest – this is for the honor of the international community,” he said in the French city of Strasbourg.

“These strikes don’t necessarily resolve anything but I think they were important,” Macron added.

The war of words continued to spiral between the Russian-backed Syria regime and the West but a military escalation looked to have been averted despite both sides trading threats after the strikes.

Yet, a report on state news agency SANA that Syrian air defenses had shot down missiles over Homs province overnight raised fears that further action had indeed been taken. Explosions were heard overnight near Shayrat air base, southeast of Homs city, and near Damascus where two other air bases are located, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. Later Tuesday, however, SANA retracted the report, stressing there had been “no external attack” on Syria.

“Last night, a false alarm that Syrian air space had been penetrated triggered the blowing of air defense sirens and the firing of several missiles,” a military source told the agency.

Both the U.S. and Israel appeared to deny involvement in the overnight incident, which would have been the third time that Homs province was bombed in just over a week.

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