US must stop support for terrorists in Syria: Analyst

The United States and its regional allies must withhold their financial, political and logistical support to terrorists in Syria in order for any ceasefire to be effective, an American political analyst says.

Mark Dankof, a political commentator and broadcaster in San Antonio, Texas, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday.

He was commenting on a White House statement which says US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin discussed the Syrian truce, set to begin on February 27.

The comments were made after diplomatic sources said that a draft deal had been reached between Russia and the United States, calling for a ceasefire to start in Syria in late February.

On Sunday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, had reached a provisional agreement on the "cessation of hostilities" in Syria, noting the sides were closer to a ceasefire than ever before.

Russia will speak to the Syrian government and Iran, and the US will speak to the Syrian opposition and its partners, Kerry said.

The truce would exclude two major militant groups in Syria, namely Daesh and al-Nusra Front.

Dankof said the United States and its allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria.

“So the burden of proof it seems to me is on the United States and on Barack Obama basically to come clean of the fact of what that they have been doing since March of 2011,” he said.

“It’s immoral, it’s illegal, and it resulted in somewhere between 250,000  to 470,000 deaths in that country, not to mention millions displaced which’s caused a catastrophe not only in Syria but also [created] the present migrant crisis in Europe,” he added.

“This is entirely the responsibility of the West and the United States in particular, Israel in particular, and then of course Saudi Arabia and Turkey and their extremist friends in the region,” the commentator stated.

“So in that context, I think Putin is engaging in a very good diplomacy here, indicating of course once again that he is willing to go the extra mile in these conversations, in these discussions,” he noted.

“But it needs to be understood, from the Russian perspective that they should insist, absolutely insist that these assurances that al-Qaeda will not be a part of a ceasefire, ISIS [Daesh] will not be a part of a ceasefire, that [it] would be absolutely stringently obeyed by the other side,” he emphasized.

The analyst said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is correct that “essentially it must be proven that the United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey are going to withhold” their financial, political and logistical support that they “have clearly been providing to these extremists since March of 2011.”

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