Saudi Arabia, UAE will deploy commandos to Syria: Carter

The United States is “confident” that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will send commandos to Syria to help militants fighting against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.

"We're going to try to give opportunities and power to ... particularly Sunni Arabs in Syria who want to re-seize their territory back from ISIL, especially [the Syrian the city of] Raqqah," US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Friday after talks at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Carter, who held meetings with UAE officials on Friday, said they had also pledged to resume participating in the US-led air offensive against Daesh in Syria.

The Pentagon chief said he had received similar assurances from Saudi Arabia a day earlier in his meeting with Saudi Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman in Brussels.

Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, now control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.

Since September 2014, the US and some of its Middle Eastern allies have been carrying out airstrikes purportedly against Daesh targets inside Syria without getting approval from the Syrian government.

In September last year, Russia also began conducting airstrikes on the positions of Daesh and other militant groups in Syria, but based on a request by the government in Damascus.

The Syrian army’s fight against terrorists took a new turn after Russia started launching airstrikes against the Takfiri terrorists.

On Friday morning, US Secretary of State John Kerry said ministers meeting for Syria crisis talks in Germany have agreed to “accelerate and expand” humanitarian aid to the conflict-hit country.

Kerry made the remarks at the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting in the German city of Munich where the working group of 17 countries began a new round of Syria peace talks on Thursday focusing on calls for a ceasefire and access for humanitarian aid.

In a recent interview with Press TV, an American scholar and political analyst said the US and its allies are using the modus operandi of peace talks on Syria to try “to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

Professor Dennis Etler said the US position in Syria and the Middle East has been “severely eroded, and must be retooled.”

“It would be extremely naive however to think that the US and its Saudi allies are about to give up the ghost and acquiesce in the triumph of Assad and his Russian allies in thwarting US attempts at regime change,” he stated in December.

“The US and its allies will now shift to the peace table to try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This has always been the US fallback position when the going gets tough in order to allow it to regroup and press on. This scenario has been the US modus operandi ever since the war in Vietnam,” the analyst pointed out.   

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