Pressure to act

Obama facing pressure to act on Assad

By Nahal Toosi

The Obama administration, buoyed by a rare measure of good news from Syria, now faces increasing pressure to prove it is serious about pushing Bashar Assad out of power.

A cease-fire has held for more than a month, and humanitarian aid is reaching Syrian areas long under siege, developments that a senior U.S. official said have “pleasantly surprised" the administration. But despite an ongoing peace process, little progress has been made on a political settlement among the parties involved.

U.S.-backed Syrian opposition leaders want President Barack Obama to push harder for an agreement that bids farewell to Assad, the Syrian dictator they blame for the past five years of bloodshed. Some worry that if a deal on a political transition isn't reached soon, the U.S. presidential election could distract the administration and sap its resolve.

“We have a window of opportunity from now until June,” predicted Hadi al-Bahra, a Syrian opposition leader.

Assad shows no signs of packing his bags. If anything, his army's ouster of the Islamic State from the ancient city of Palmyra this past weekend could undermine the Obama administration's argument against him, especially as the recent terrorist strike in Brussels raises fears about the jihadist group's reach.

State Department spokesman John Kirby demurred when asked Monday whether the U.S. wished to congratulate Assad on his Palmyra campaign, although he stressed that it was happy to see the Islamic State defeated.

Kirby also said it was too soon to tell how Palmyra's liberation will affect the peace talks, but that the U.S. wants a political transition and Assad's future to be resolved as soon as possible. He made sure to reiterate that Assad's rule has been a major recruitment tool for the Islamic State.

"There’s been no change on our part on what the future for Assad and Syria need to be," Kirby added. "We continue to believe that he has lost legitimacy to govern, that what the Syrian people need is a government away from him and one that’s toward institutions that are representative of them and responsive to their needs."

Philip Gordon, a former Middle East adviser to Obama, said the various parties involved should first aim for achievable, incremental goals, such as a deal on prisoner releases, before rushing to decide Assad's fate when the cease-fire is still so fragile.

"We have to be careful about not expecting too much too soon. There’s not going to be a quick agreement on a political transition," said Gordon, who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Staffan De Mistura, the U.N. envoy overseeing the Syrian peace process, has set April 9 as a target for the next round of talks. The most recent round, which involved proximity talks, not face-to-face sessions, ended Thursday after 10 days, and it was considered successful mainly because it didn't collapse.

De Mistura's office released a document listing 12 points of common ground he found between the opposition and the Syrian government that he hopes future talks can build on. There's no mention of Assad.

There's some hope that the Syrian strongman will eventually be persuaded to leave or at least agree to a decentralized power structure in Syria. That hope has been fanned in part by Russia's recent decision to withdraw much of its military support for Assad after months of helping him make gains.

Some analysts saw the Russian decision as a signal to Assad to get serious about peace talks and not count on Moscow to help him reconquer the whole country, where fighting since 2011 has killed more than 250,000 people. (Russia did aid Assad's troops in the Palmyra battle; the cease-fire agreement does not cover the Islamic State.)

Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry met with top officials in Moscow and said that the U.S. and Russia had agreed to "accelerate the effort to try to move the political process forward." He also told CBS news in an interview afterward that Russia is not "wedded" to Assad.

"If I am Bashar Assad, I am not reassured by the talk I hear coming out of Moscow," the senior Obama administration official told POLITICO. "It’s a pretty clear signal that the Russians are coming on board."

But Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute warned that Russia is playing the long game. Moscow will insist that Assad be allowed to compete in any elections as part of a political transition, and, if Europe is still facing terrorist attacks, its leaders may give in on that notion even if the U.S. doesn't.

“What Assad is trying to do is to change the narrative about him from being one of the root causes of the Islamic State to being an indispensable partner in the fight against the Islamic State,” Slim said.

Asked whether the 2016 elections would in any way undermine the Syria peace effort, the senior official insisted that “Syria always has and always will be a priority of this administration.” Syrian opposition leaders, however, remain distrustful of Obama, whom they've long considered too slow to react to their needs.

When asked how Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump would handle the Syria crisis, al-Bahra was surprisingly complimentary, pointing to Trump's support for safe zones in the Arab state as one example.

Overall, Trump would be a terrible president, al-Bahra said, but when it comes to Syria in particular, "he will not be worse" than Obama.