The U.S., U.K. and Canada expressed support this week for sending arms to rebel groups battling Syrian President Bashar Assad, opening a diplomatic chasm with Russia during a meeting of leading industrial nations known as the G-8. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stalwart supporter of Assad, sharply criticized the decision, casting the rebels as barbaric terrorists.
World leaders will begin their arguments from opposing positions on how to deal with ongoing conflict of the Syrian war. The latest United Nations estimate places the conflict’s death toll at 93,000 people — including 1,729 children under 10 years old.
Humanitarian aid agencies estimate that there could be 1.1 million refugees by the end of June, living mostly in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
For world powers, the question remains whether to arm Assad or the rebels — or to stay out of the ongoing Syrian crisis altogether. Statements made at the G-8 could be a harbinger of a broader international intervention.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close ally of embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad, used gruesome language to describe the action of Sunni rebels, many of whom are suspected of belonging to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
“You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras,” Putin said. “Are these the people you want to support? Is it them who you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years.”
Conversely, President Barack Obama announced plans to arm Syrian rebels after intelligence agencies reported Assad allegedly using chemical weapons against the rebels, leading to the deaths of 100 to 150 people. For over a year, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other countries have been supplying training and “non-lethal” aid to the rebels, but the countries have not officially provided arms until now.
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed Putin was backing Assad’s “thugs.”
“I don’t think we should fool ourselves,” he said. “This is G-7 plus one. We in the west have a very different perspective on this situation. Mr. Putin and his government are supporting the thugs of the Assad regime for their own reasons that I do not think are justifiable, and Mr. Putin knows my view on that.”
Although British Prime Minister David Cameron supports the rebels and has backed arming them, some elected officials in Britain — including the mayor of London, Boris Johnson — warned that there would be no way to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of “al-Qaida-affiliated thugs.”
Johnson explained in the Daily Telegraph that some rebel elements were fighting “not for freedom but for a terrifying Islamic state in which they would have the whip hand – and yet there is no dodging or fudging the matter: these are among the Syrian rebels who are hoping now to benefit from the flow of Western arms.”