AFP 2017/ ANDREJ ISAKOVIC
Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov says Moscow will investigate the US letting militants in Syria and Iraq get away.
He said that Russia, Jordan and the US had arranged a de-escalation zone on the south-west of Syria.
“This was an important achievement, though we can not claim it will last for long,” Lavrov said. “If you keep up with the news from the Ministry of Defense, you may know that a lot of armed militants are getting out of US-controlled Syrian territories and Iraq, and create a lot of problems for the Syrian Army.”
According to Lavrov, Moscow is currently investigating Washington regarding the militants getting away from the US-controlled territories. “I hope this isn’t deliberate,” he added.
Lavrov also added that Jabhat al-Nusra (currently known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) may be deliberately kept safe as a backup plan in order to bring down the Syrian government in the future.
He said that back in September of 2016 Russia and the US had agreed to separate the Syrian opposition forces and the terrorists, however Washington had not upheld its part of the agreement.
The US-led Coalition had previously negotiated with ISIS terrorists in Manbij, Al-Thawrah and Raqqa, letting them withdraw in exchange for having those territories controlled in Syria.
The US-backed Iraqi offensive on Mosul had intentionally left the city’s west side open letting ISIS withdraw its forces en masse across the border into Syria and swamp the Syrian Army forces there. However, this plan failed thanks to a rapid advance of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units in the area.
In a show of hypocrisy, the US claimed that “terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not bused across Syria”, when the ISIS forces were arranged to leave a part of the Syrian-Lebanese border by the Hezbollah, the Lebanese Army and the Syrian Army.
