BALADI NEWS
The head of the Russian military's command and control center warned that the war in Syria was unlikely to end unless U.S. forces withdrew from the country.
National Defense Control Center chief Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev presided over a joint Russian and Syrian emergency meeting Wednesday focused on dismantling the Rukban refugee camp located in a remote stretch of southern Syria under the control of a U.S.-led coalition and allied rebel groups.
"The United States and its allies are indifferent to the fate of ordinary Syrians," Mizintsev argued. "The Americans need hotbeds of tension in Syria only to justify their illegal presence on the territory of a sovereign state and to satisfy their geopolitical ambitions by any means. Wherever there is an American presence, one can see devastation, famine, epidemics and rampant crime."
The U.S. mobilized an international coalition to begin bombing ISIS in 2014 and, as a CIA program to assist rebels began being replaced with a Pentagon effort to back a mostly Kurdish militia the following year, Russia entered the fight on behalf of the Syrian government. The two rival campaigns pursued separate offensives that largely defeated ISIS, but incited further geopolitical tensions.
U.S. presence in Syria was largely limited to north and eastern stretches under the control of the majority-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), but also included a roughly 34-mile zone surrounding a base at Al-Tanf.
Syria, Russia and Iran have repeatedly called on the U.S. to withdraw from the country, viewing it as an occupying power as it did not operate under the authority of Damascus.
Source: NewsWeek.