Iran’s Salehi meets embattled Syrian president

Iran’s foreign minister met embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, as a rights watchdog accused Damascus of waging “relentless, indiscriminate” attacks against its own people.
Speaking on arrival at Damascus airport, Ali Akbar Salehi said a solution to the 18-month conflict in the country lies “only in Syria and within the Syrian family.”
Salehi, who called this week for a simultaneous halt to the fighting by both regime and rebel forces, added this should be done in “partnership with international and regional organisations.” But Amnesty International, the London-based rights group, accused the Damascus regime of waging “relentless, indiscriminate” attacks against its own people.
And the former head of Syria’s chemical arsenal, Major General Adnan Sillu, was quoted by British newspaper The Times as saying he believed the regime would eventually use those weapons against civilians.
Salehi, quoted by Syrian state news agency SANA, said the country was “facing a problem, and we hope that this problem can be solved as soon as possible.”
The minister said “Syria has very strong, solid ties with Iran, especially at the political level,” and that he would discuss the conflict with Syrian officials.
“We will be consulting on all political aspects of this problem that Syria is facing,” he said.
Salehi’s call for an end to fighting came at a meeting in Cairo on Monday of the Syria “contact group,” to which Iran, as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey belong.
Tehran, a staunch ally of the regime in Damascus, is also proposing the four countries dispatch observers to Syria in an effort to quell the violence.
Last month, the United Nations withdrew its own observers after both sides failed to respect an April ceasefire to which they had committed themselves.
Iran has strenuously denied accusations it is providing military aid to Assad’s regime.
In turn, it accuses the West and several regional countries — notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey — of providing military and financial assistance to Syrian rebels.
In a statement, Amnesty said “civilians, many of them children, are the main victims of a campaign of relentless and indiscriminate attacks by the Syrian army.”
It said it had new evidence “of a pattern which has emerged in recent weeks in areas where government forces, pushed into retreat by opposition forces, are now indiscriminately bombing and shelling lost territory — with disastrous consequences for the civilian population.”
And The Times quoted defected Major General Sillu as saying he had been involved in “serious discussion about the use of chemical weapons, including how we would use them and in what areas.”