Saudi Arabia key obstacle to Syria’s peace: Edward Spannaus
Press TV has conducted an interview with Edward Spannaus, legal affairs editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, about the dire humanitarian situation in Syria.
- Now looking at the numbers, the situation does sound extremely dire for the civilians inside Syria. What do you make of it?
- Well it is a very dire situation and it has been so for many, many months and the reason for that is that the Western countries particularly the United States and Britain will not put any pressure on the Saudis who are the primary sponsors of the so-called opposition forces for actually by and large al-Qaeda.
Syria has become the largest center for al-Qaeda now than anywhere in the world. And until the United States agrees to crackdown on Saudi Arabia with the primary backers arming and financing opposition, this chaos will continue.
- Well all eyes were on the Geneva II peace conference to figure out a solution to what is taking place in Syria but now we are seeing the so-called Syrian National Coalition placing pre-conditions as to the formation of this conference. Does that goes to show in particular how bleak are the prospects of peaceful solution to this as long as pre-conditions are being set by the opposition?
- Right. Well there should be no pre-condition. The Assad government has given their consent to these negotiations as the UN has suggested Iran should participate in these. All the neighbors, the relevant neighbors should participate and they should go ahead. There is no reason for these not to.
And as I said the key obstacle on this right now are the Saudis, is Saudi Arabia and the failure of the Obama government in United States and Cameron in Britain to crackdown on the Saudis. That is the problem.
- And we have also seen a lot of aid organizations appealing to the international community for funds which are not coming through. It is quite interesting to know that there are more than enough funds to go around to help support these Takfiri insurgents fighting the Syrian government but not to help the civilians?
- Yes that is absolutely correct. The [Persian] Gulf states, mean particularly again the Saudi Arabia is pouring all kinds of money and arms into there to increase the chaos and humanitarian situation gets worse.
So it is a danger inside Syria and there is an international danger because of the war danger, if this continues, any time you have a danger of drawing the United States, Russia into a confrontation.
So this Geneva process should go ahead. The Saudis should be reined in and the situation could be cleaned up.
- It seems when you look at John Kerry’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia that the US is doing anything but that?
- Yes absolutely. I mean if Kerry were honest and Obama, they would demand Saudi Arabia come clean on the 9/11 attacks in the US.
So as long as that the Saudi role in 9/11 is not exposed and is not brought out, none of the rest of these will work and Kerry’s visit to Saudi Arabia is a bad joke.