Syrians Should Decide Own Fate: Iran’s FM
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Iranian foreign minister emphasized that Syrians alone have the right to shape their own future, saying such attitude was explicitly announced by Iran in an international meeting in Vienna, held to settle the crisis in Syria.
“We asserted a number of points in the (Vienna) meeting, many of which are included in the final communiqué. One of those was that the main party that decides in Syria is that country’s people,” Mohammad Javad Zarif told reporters in the Austrian capital on Friday, after a multilateral meeting on the Syrian crisis.
Foreign ministers from some 20 countries, including Iran, the US and Russia, gathered in Vienna on Friday for talks on the four-and-a-half-year war in Syria.
Elsewhere in his comments, the Iranian minister said Tehran has made it clear that the meeting was an effort to accelerate the achievement of a political solution to the crisis in Syria and that “we have not come to this meeting to choose a supervisor for Syria.”
Zarif also pointed to the conflicting views among the participants in the Vienna meeting, saying a number of countries had entered the talks with the notion that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be booted out.
He further highlighted the significance of concerted action against terrorism, noting that all neighbors and international players should accept that the ISIL is not a leverage for the political games, but a “serious threat” to the security of all countries.
Syria has been gripped by civil war since March 2011 with Takfiri terrorists from various groups, including the ISIL, currently controlling parts of it.
According to the United Nations, more than 240,000 people have been killed and one million wounded during the conflict.