Zarif to Meet President Assad, Counterpart in Damascus

Date: 19 April 2020 - 21:21

News ID: ۷۷۶۱۸

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Iran’s Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif will meet Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Monday, Tehran said over the weekend, in what would be their first official meeting in a year.
Zarif plans to travel to Damascus for a one-day visit to discuss bilateral relations, regional developments and Syria’s "fight against terrorism,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
Zarif will also meet his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem, it added.
Iran, along with Russia, is one of the Damascus government’s main allies in the war that has ravaged Syria since 2011. Zarif previously met Assad during a visit to Damascus in April last year.
Prominent Arab journalist Abdul Bari Atwan said on Friday the U.S. seeks to consolidate its control over Syria’s northeastern oil fields as Damascus is preoccupied with tackling the COVID-19 outbreak.
In an opinion piece published by the Arab Rai al-Youm website on Friday, Atwan said that the U.S. and its regional allies were seeking to facilitate the looting of Syria’s oil using local mercenaries.
"Reports received from al-Hasaka in northeastern Syria indicate that the CIA has set up a recruitment and training center enlisting members of the Syrian Democratic Forces,” Atwan said of Kurdish militants.
The journalist added that the enlisted forces are given a monthly salary of $350 in order to guard the Syrian oil fields under U.S. control.
The operations take place to allow "oil smuggling operations towards neighboring states, including Kurdish-administered Iraq and certain contractors including representatives of Israeli companies,” he said.
Atwan noted that U.S. President Donald Trump has on numerous occasions said that he intends to collect money from Syrian oil wells as "war spoils” and also grant a sum of it to "his Kurdish allies, specifically the SDF”.
The Arab country has since 1979 been under arrays of unilateral economic U.S. sanctions,
which coupled with years-long foreign-backed terrorism have seriously damaged the healthcare sector in Syria.
Referring to an incident where over two dozen fighters affiliated to the U.S.-supported Maghawir al-Thawra terrorist group joined the Syrian government forces from al-Tanf earlier this week, Atwan said similar incidents are expected in the future.
He added that similar events of a "larger scale” may also take place once Iraq starts implementing the parliament’s decision to abolish U.S. military presence in the country.