WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th February, 2019) The United States will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to Syria but will refrain from any efforts that would strengthen the leadership of Syrian President Bashar Assad, a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday.
"We are going to stick to our current policy [on Assad] while being the number one humanitarian donor to Syria," the official said. "We are not going to do anything in terms of reconstruction that would bolster the regime absent fairly significant political concessions on the part of Assad."
The official said it would be "very hard" for the United States to envision any future for Syria in which Assad plays a responsible role.
"We are supporting the UN [peace] process. We very much hope for a brighter future for the Syrian people, but it's hard for us to envision that with Assad at the helm," the official added.
US officials have repeatedly called for Assad to resign, and Washington has supported a variety of militant groups that have fought to topple his government.
The United States also leads a coalition of more than 70 countries that is battling the Islamic State (outlawed in Russia) terrorist group in Syria, though neither Assad nor the United Nations has authorized its operations.
Trump announced in December that US forces would soon leave Syria and declared the IS terror group defeated in the country.
In June 2017, the US president ended a covert CIA program to arm and train militants fighting to oust Assad. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an interview in July 2017 that he canceled the CIA program after learning that it had supplied weapons to the Al-Qaeda terrorist group (banned in Russia).
