Russia urged the U.S. to coordinate its airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria with the Syrian government to make them more effective.
The failure by the U.S. and its allies to work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on fighting Islamic State marks a lack of “pragmatism and common sense,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today.
“It’s very important that cooperation with Syrian authorities is established because excluding Syria from the struggle that is taking place not only goes against international law but undermines the efficiency of these operations,” Lavrov told reporters in New York, where he’s attending the United Nations General Assembly.
The U.S. this week expanded its bombing of Islamic State targets to Syria, backed by the broadest Arab-U.S. military coalition since the 1991 Gulf War, after opening the air campaign last month in Iraq. The Sunni extremist group has seized swaths of territory in both countries this year.
While the U.S. informed Syria before the first strikes this week, it says it won’t collaborate with Assad’s government. As part of the deal that brought Sunni nations into the anti-Islamic State coalition, President Barack Obama agreed to increase U.S. efforts to train and equip Syrian rebels in line with American policy seeking Assad’s removal.
The U.K. is set to join airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq, after Parliament voted overwhelmingly today to support action. Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband said he supports action in Iraq, but has yet to be convinced about extending it into Syria. He said there are “outstanding questions” about whether that means cooperating with Assad.
Russia, a Soviet-era ally of Syria, is supplying it with weapons and cooperating on intelligence to help it fight the Islamic terrorist threat, the Russian foreign minister said.
“They say ‘if Bashar al-Assad goes, everything will be fine,’” Lavrov said. “It won’t be fine.”
