Danger of US-Russia conflict in Syria, not serious: Commentator

Press TV has conducted an interview with Fred Weir, a journalist and political commentator, in Moscow, about Pentagon considering the use of military force against Russia to protect US-trained militants in Syria.

What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: What do you make of the comments coming out of the Pentagon, where it is basically threatening Russia with military action?

Weir: Well, it sounds pretty ominous and it is, I think, everybody’s nightmare that these separate actions in Syria could lead to confrontation between Russia and the US; that is a very, very serious danger but I am not ready to take it very seriously because, I think, first the US has to introduce us to who are these pro-US moderate militants on the ground in Syria because they have been pretty secretive about who the CIA has been training and what they have been doing until now.

There are these Pentagon guys who in last year had been trained up in Turkey but they are practically nonexistent. I mean, in front of Congress, in congressional testimony a US general admitted last month that there are only four or five of them actually in the field. So I do not think that is the problem. There is some other supposedly pro-US army that they are worried about but let’s meet these guys, let’s see who they are. I do not think the United States wants to go there and therefore I do not think this rhetoric will go very so far.

Press TV: But, then, this obviously does raise questions as far as the current situation in Syria where you do have the US training those militants and sending them in to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad and also conducting airstrikes against what they describe as Daesh forces and this is while Russia is carrying out its own mandate in the same country. Isn’t that going to create some form of a rift militarily speaking?

Weir: Well, no! Theoretically, we all have the same enemy. It is IS and al-Qaeda. I think al-Qaeda is still the official enemy and the biggest known IS group in Syria – Jabhat al-Nusra – is al-Qaeda-affiliated, so I do not see why this is happening.

It is just this argument about Assad and it is pretty clear that the Russians have a strategy in which they are going to act as the air force for the army of Assad and perhaps Iranian and Hezbollah volunteers and launch an offensive and they are probably not going to make any fine distinctions between IS and Jabhat al-Nusra or some of the other groups that are there opposing Assad. I think their idea is to roll over them.

I think the ball is in the US’s court. They really have to show which groups then and explain why and presumably introduce journalists to these guys who are supposedly going to bring democracy to Syria. They have to do that before I start having any sympathy for those militants that the Russians are bombing. For example, I have to see how they are really moderate, pro-Western liberal democrats.

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