The head of Syria's Air Defense has been killed in fighting east of Damascus, an Islamist rebel coalition and a monitoring group said on Sunday, according to Reuters.
The Islamic Front and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said General Hussein Ishaq died of wounds suffered during a military offensive by President Bashar al-Assad's forces against rebels in Mleiha suburb, where the Air Defense administration has a large base.
The Islamic Front and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said General Hussein Ishaq died of wounds suffered during a military offensive by President Bashar al-Assad's forces against rebels in Mleiha suburb, where the Air Defense administration has a large base.
Ishaq died on Sunday of wounds inflicted a day earlier. He is one of a handful of high-ranking military officers to be killed in the country's civil war.
Mleiha is close to the road linking central Damascus to the international airport. It is also on the edge of the eastern Ghouta region - a mix of farmland and small towns which have formed a base for rebel fighters but which have been surrounded by Assad's forces for more than a year.
Faisal Mekdad, deputy Foreign Minister of Syria, believes that France, US and UK provide support to the terrorists operating on Syrian territory, Lebanese media reported on Saturday. He said that these countries seek to thwart the reforms aimed at promoting democracy, human rights and creating a rule-of-law state in Syria.
Furthermore, he said that Israel seeks to undermine the presidential elections in Syria scheduled on June 3. "We were baffled by arbitrary actions and open interventions by countries that claim to be democratic but in fact have no idea of the meaning of democracy," Mekdad said.
According to him, Western governments employ a policy of double standards. The deputy Minister pointed out that those countries' leaders are corrupt, and that they support 'terrorist and murderers', groups like The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Al-Nusra Front and Islamic Front.
He also added that Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Wahhabism, a radical school of Islam.
Moscow disagrees with the West that the Geneva peace process in Syria is a failure, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday. The statement followed a ministerial meeting in London on May 15 of what has been left of the so-called Friends of Syria Group, also known as "London 11", which was set up on the initiative of United States and its Western allies.
"Some of our partners, key players in the London-11 group, claim that the Geneva process has failed. We would like to stress that none of the Syrian parties has rejected the prospect of resuming and continuing the Geneva talks. And Moscow would be ready to strongly support those sentiments, because the logic of Geneva is the logic of a peaceful political solution, whose only alternative is the logic of war," the ministry said.
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