Foreign ministers of leading industrialized nations were meeting Monday amid heightened tensions between Russia and the United States over the Trump administration’s unexpected military strike on a Syrian airbase.
Leading members of the G7, at a summit in Italy, will get their first chance to seek clarity from US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on whether the US is now committed to deposing the regime of Syrian President President Bashar al-Assad.
The foreign ministers are likely to put pressure on Russia to reconsider its support for Assad in the wake of the chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in northwest Syria that killed more than 80 people. The attack was widely blamed on the Assad regime.
Senior Trump administration officials stepped up their rhetoric against Russia at the weekend, ahead of a meeting between Tillerson and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Moscow later this week.
Tillerson said Russia’s support of the Syrian regime made it complicit in the actions of President Bashar al-Assad.
“I hope Russia is thinking carefully about its continued alliance with Bashar al-Assad, because every time one of these horrific attacks occurs, it draws Russia closer into some level of responsibility,” Tillerson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday.
Haley said Tillerson would put pressure on Moscow over its support for Assad. “There’s a lot of answers that need to come from Russia. I think that’s why it’s good that Secretary Tillerson is going to Russia this next week. And I think that there will be a lot of answers that come out of that meeting,” she told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“We’re calling (Russia and Iran) out,” Haley said. “But I don’t think anything is off the table at this point. I think what you’re going to see is strong leadership. You’re going to continue to see the United States act when we need to act.”
Foreign ministers of the G7 group of nations, which include the US, Japan, Britain and Germany, will be looking for clarity on Syria from Tillerson when they met Lucca, Italy.
Since ordering the strike on the Shayrat airbase in western Syria, the US has been sending mixed signals. Nikky Haley, the UN ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN on Sunday that regime change was inevitable in Syria. But Tillerson was more equivocal, telling CBS that the first priority was the defeat of ISIS.
The US fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat Airfield in Syria Friday, which housed the warplanes the US believes were used in last week’s chemical weapons attack on civilians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the strike on the phone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Sunday. Both leaders agreed on the “inadmissibility” of US action against a sovereign state.
In a statement issued by the Kremlin, Russia and Iran both called for an “objective, unbiased” investigation into the chemical attack that provoked the strikes.
Warning from Iran
On Monday, Rouhani warned the US not to carry out any more strikes against Syria. “Repeating this action can be very dangerous for the region,” he said.
Tillerson and Lavrov discussed the missile strike in a phone call Saturday. According to a statement issued by Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Lavrov said US statements that the Syrian government used chemical weapons “do not correspond with reality.”
“Lavrov stressed that an attack on a country whose government is fighting terrorism only plays into the hands of extremists creates additional threats to regional and global security,” the statement said.
Tillerson said that Russia should do more to meet commitments it made in 2013 to guarantee the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. “That will part of the discussions when I visit Moscow next week is to call upon Foreign Minister Lavrov and the Russian government to fulfill the obligation it made to the international community when it agreed to be the guarantor of the elimination of the chemical weapons,” he told ABC.
“And why Russia has not been able to achieve that is unclear to me. I don’t draw conclusions of complicity at all, but clearly they’ve been incompetent and perhaps they’ve just simply been out-maneuvered by the Syrians.”
Regime change in Syria inevitable: US
The Trump administration has hardened its position on Assad’s future n the past few days,.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told CNN a change of government in the war-ravaged nation was “inevitable.”
“If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad,” she said.
“Regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria.”
Haley’s comments were a significant departure from President Donald Trump’s previous stance on Assad’s future — before to his election victory in November, he said fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was “idiocy.”