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Iran backs six-month Syria 'transition' at Vienna peace talks

30 October 2015 17:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Iran signaled on Friday it backed a six-month transition period in Syria followed by elections to decide Bashar al-Assad's fate, a proposal floated at peace talks as a concession but which the president's foes rejected as a trick to keep him in power, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Sources who described the Iranian proposal said it amounted to Assad's closest ally dropping its insistence on him remaining in office.

But Assad's enemies say a new election would keep him in power unless other steps were taken to remove him. His government held an election as recently as last year, which he easily won. His opponents have always rejected any proposal for a transition unless he is removed.

Iranian officials attended international peace talks on Syria for the first time on Friday in Vienna, a month after the balance of power in the 4-year-old civil war shifted in Assad's favor with Russia launching air strikes against his foes.

Iran appears to be adjusting its stance in ways that could create more ground for compromise with Western countries that are coming to accept Assad cannot be driven from power by force.

"Iran does not insist on keeping Assad in power forever," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian, a member of Tehran's delegation at the Syria talks on Friday, was quoted by Iranian media as saying.

A senior official from the Middle East familiar with the Iranian position said that could go as far as ending support for Assad after the transition period.

"Talks are all about compromises and Iran is ready to make a compromise by accepting Assad remaining for six months," the official told Reuters. "Of course, it will be up to the Syrian people to decide about the country's fate."

Syrian opposition figures, already bristling from having been excluded from Friday's talks about the fate of their country, dismissed the reported Iranian proposal as a ruse.

"Who is mad enough to believe that under these circumstances in Syria, anybody can hold elections?" said George Sabra, a member of the Western-backed political opposition, the exiled Syrian National Coalition, told Reuters. "Bashar al-Assad and his regime is the root of the terrorism in Syria."

They say any fair vote is impossible in wartime conditions in which nearly half of the country is displaced.

"In the shadow of this anarchy there will not be real elections, therefore we reject them absolutely," said Ahmed al-Seoud, a fighter in the rebel 13th Division which has been fighting in the western Hama province.

Abu Ghaith al-Shami, a spokesman for the rebel Alwiyat Seif al-Sham group which is fighting in the south, said Assad's participation in an election was unthinkable: "The fate of Assad and all criminals should be in court following the massacres committed by him and those with him, towards the Syrian people."