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• As the “Friends of Syria” summit begins this week, intense terrorist attacks are expected all across Syria.

By Amer Al Sabaileh

Expectations of a military intervention in Syria were reduced after the “Eager Lion” military exercises. Meanwhile, the American Axis are back to meeting under the umbrella of the “Friends of Syria Summit”, to discuss sending weapons to the rebels in Syria.

Many are questioning the real position of the West and its goals. However, in the last G8 summit there was agreement that fighting terrorism and eliminating the “Al Nusra front” was a priority. This is in the common interest and should be the ultimate goal of all the G8 countries for this region.
In the days after the US and its allies re-adopted an aggressive tone around the need to send weapons to Syria, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, proposed an American air raid on Syria similar to the one the Democrat administration of Bill Clinton launched in Yugoslavia.

This proposal, according to some reports, was the reason behind a deep disagreement among senior players in Obama’s administration. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dempsey refused the idea, asking Kerry, if he himself has a clear vision of how to deal with the situation after such a raid.

This kind of disagreement comes from the dilemma of managing the desire to topple the Syrian regime and the fear of repeating the mistake of Iraq, and the terrorism that spread as a result.

This dilemma is paralyzing US policy making and has lead to the policy of maintaining the crisis and creating hotspots (by proxy) inside Syria, hoping to exhaust the Syrian regime to the extent that it enables the US to impose its conditions of the settlements on Syria’s allies.

This in turn has Anti-Syria groups condemning terrorism but at the same time, giving the green light to its allies to send fighters and weapons through the border, beside the logistic and intelligence support.

It seems that some members of the American administration also believed that keeping the Syrian crisis going would an opportunity to solve many other regional issues, such as the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, and make of the Syrian political settlement the path that leads to broader settlements in the region.

Yet, this “dreamy vision” faces many obstacles on the ground, from the way the military scene in Syria has developed to Israeli stubbornness and Palestine’s crisis of governance.

On the other hand, Russian diplomacy has managed to reach out to some key players in the “Friends of Syria” group, mainly, the EU and NATO. Germany for example, is playing a very rational role in protecting the region from collapsing into chaos and terrorism by refusing to send weapons to the fighters. At the same time it is using all its diplomatic and security channels to find a potential end to the crisis.

Italy is also one of the Russian diplomatic targets on Syria. In his last visit to Rome, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov managed to gain Italian support for a peaceful solution. Both the Italian Foreign Minister and Minister of Defense refused the idea of sending weapons to fighters in Syria and both agreed to push for a “peace conference” attended by all the countries involved in the conflict, including Iran.

Nothing is expected to come from Doha’s summit, but there is a risk that some countries’ return to arming the terrorist groups in Syria. This is a particular risk as the US Axis fears that going to “Geneva II” without any influencing cards on the table will not be effective.

Due to the recent political and military development in Syria and the region, there are likely to be new surprises related to the political crisis among the pro-American groups, mainly the gulf countries.

* Amer Al Sabaileh is a Jordanian political analyst and academic. He contributed this article to Ammon News English.

http://amersabaileh.blogpost.com