Under the Obama administration, the United States had been trying to negotiate with the Syrian Government and even their opposition groups in order to put an end to the Syrian Civil War. Many of these negotiations took place in Geneva, Switzerland. On Friday, the Syrian chief negotiator and Ambassador of the Permanent Representative Mission of Syria to the UN, Bashar al-Ja'afari, said that a U.S.-Turkish-led coalition attack on ISIS in Raqqa was illegitimate unless coordinated with the Syrian government.
Al-Ja'afari's statements are only the latest effort by the Syrian government to express some form of legitimacy and now under a new President Trump, who has promised to "wipe ISIS off the face of the Earth." The ambassador was much more specific with reporters as to who the government currently saw as legitimate enough to wage a war on ISIS in Syria by saying that it was the Syrian Arab Army with the support of Russia and Iran.
He also went as far as to say that the U.S.-led coalition were sponsors of terrorism because they've armed the opposition against the Syrian government.
U.S.-led coalition versus Bashar al-Assad
The Syrian government's accusations against the U.S. being sponsors of terrorism is not new. Since western powers have expressed outrage that the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad started killing civilians during the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East, al-Assad created the narrative that everyone against him are terrorists. Over the years since the Arab Spring, factions gained support from the region to meet various agendas to topple Assad as he continued to go into cities throughout Syria massacring civilians in order to intimidate and regain control.
This created more instability which allowed terror groups to gain support for their own agendas like ISIS, a group that began recruiting everyone who had an interest in getting rid of Assad and everyone else in order to establish their own caliphate.
The Russian government's involvement in giving Assad cover only complicated matters even more, which claimed to be there to defeat terrorism but still defending the Syrian government which continued to massacre civilians.
It's even been widely reported that the Russian government under Vladimir Putin was contributing to the killing of those civilians with the United Nations and human rights groups -- even the Secretary of State John Kerry --- saying that both Assad and Putin were committing war crimes. Russia would act as the intermediary between the U.S.-led coalition and Syria and would even contribute to the Assad regime's view that the U.S.
was supporting the Islamic State. The Ambassador's recent statements in Geneva were made at a time as that same U.S.-led coalition prepares to drive the Islamic State out of the Northern city of Raqqa, while they also fight the terror group in Mosul, Iraq.
U.S. presence in Syria
For the first time and under a new U.S. president, the U.S. are making their presence known in the fight against the Islamic State. On March 10, the Associated Press reported that American troops were revealing themselves surrounding Raqqa, showing off the American flag on their vehicles as they placed Howitzer guns in position. The city of Manbij nearby from which ISIS was forced out by coalition forces last year, also reportedly had a presence of American forces there, but they're hardly considered troops on the ground as many of them have already been there to train local Kurdish fighters to take on the terror group.
But the U.S. are not the only ones who are the targets of the Syrian government's propaganda as Turkey has also wanted to get Assad out of Syria, as well as the Kurdish groups who they consider terrorists along with ISIS, which has only complicated matters more. It's now being reported by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group that SDF (coalition) fighters are battling ISIS over the Tabqa air base near Raqqa, which they've held since 2014.
