News / Interviews

Middle East powers able to resolve crisis in Syria: Pundit

Saturday, 15 October 2016 7:44 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 15 October 2016 7:52 AM ]

Foreign-backed militants fire an anti-aircraft machine gun mounted on a vehicle in the northern Syrian village of Yahmoul in the Marj Dabiq area north of the embattled city of Aleppo on October 10, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Powerful states in the Middle East are more capable than the United States and Russia to find a solution to end the five-year-old crisis in Syria, says an activist and political commentator.

“It is probably more of the work of the Organization of Islamic [Cooperation] or the Arab League or the immediate partners like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Syria and also Turkey in order to find one way out” of the conflict, Hazem Salem told Press TV’s "The Debate" program.

On Saturday, a new round of Syria peace talks is scheduled to be held in Switzerland among foreign ministers of several countries, including Iran, Russia and the US, to find a solution to the conflict.

According to Salem, the Lausanne conference on Syria will have a tangible result if countries including Syria, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia try to find a common ground in order to “freeze the violence” and pursue a way out of the conflict through “negotiations.”

Since Russia and the US are not able to find a resolution for the chaos in Syria, regional countries should take step-by-step measures to start humanitarian aid and partial truce and then push for cessation of hostilities in the Arab country, he argued.

Also speaking on the program, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Serwer, touched on the new international bid, saying he saw “no real possibility of this leading to a political solution.”

The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria, which started in March 2011, has claimed the lives of more than 400,000 people, according to an estimate by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

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