Syria is still not out of the woods, senior UAE official Gargash says
We hope Syrians will work together, and avoid impending chaos, he says
Dubai: The UAE remains “very worried” by threats to the territorial integrity of Syria and the risk that the country may succumb to extremism and terrorism, BBC quoted Dr. Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Adviser to His Highness the President of the UAE, as saying.
“Syria is still not out of the woods,” said Dr. Gargash. “We hope the Syrians will work together, that we don’t just see another episode of impending chaos.”
Gargash was addressing the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain, organised by the London-based think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the BBC report said.
“When people are asked, you know, where is Bashar Al Assad, I say when you look at this, at the end of the day, this is a footnote in history,” he said.
“I am reminded a little bit by Kaiser Wilhelm the second in 1918 who went to a long exile that he spent for many years, many people think in Holland. I don’t think when you look at that period, I don’t think that his is really critical.”
3 main concerns
He said the UAE had three main concerns about events in Syria. “I think number one is the sort of territorial integrity which is still under threat. Our second concern is with regards to really getting out of this spiral of chaos and violence that the Arab world is seeing since the Arab Spring in 2011. Our third concern is about extremism and terrorism.”
He blamed the fall of the regime on Al Assad’s refusal to implement political reforms: “There was a major failure in the part of politics and policy. [Al] Assad did not really use the lifeline that was thrown to him by various Arab countries including the UAE and did not use that to open up, to move on the constitutional discussions that were taking place. He also did not open up to Turkey.”
“Ultimately this was a huge political failure. We have seen the rapid collapse of the regime in part because of the political failure,” Dr Gargash was quoted as saying.
“We have to keep a close eye. We are very worried about chaos. We are very worried about extremism. We remain worried about territorial integrity of Syria.”
“We don’t know the shape of developments in Syria. Is this going to be a sort of wiser group that will be able actually to transcend Syria’s tortured history or are we going to go back into a re-incarnation of radical and terrorist organisations? I think Syria is still not out of the woods because Syria is still, if you look at the different colours, is still a very patchy picture in terms of its territorial integrity.”