Syria opposition doesn’t need foreign fighters: Leader

By Mohamed Misto

ISTANBUL

A Syrian opposition leader said opposition groups don’t need to recruit foreign fighters in their fight against the Bashar al-Assad regime in war-torn Syria.

In an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency, Osama Rifai, the head of the Syrian Islamic Council, called for providing all forms of support to the Syrian revolution.

He opined that the presence of foreign fighters “has become a burden on the Syrians and given a pretext to other countries to label the opposition with terrorism”.

“There are young Syrians who are enthusiastic enough to serve and defend their revolution,” he said.

The opposition leader said foreigners who have joined extremist factions in Syria “have turned into a burden on the Syrian people than the regime itself”.

Rifai warned that the biggest deterrent to the victory of the Syrian opposition is “disunity and infighting among opposition groups”.

The Syrian leader stressed that opposition groups will not emerge victorious “unless all factions unite under one umbrella”.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than 400,000 people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

- Turkish role

Rifai hailed a Turkish offensive aimed at clearing Syria’s northern border area of Daesh militants.

“The terrorist PYD group seeks to divide Syria, the thing that we and Turkey reject since we hold the same interests,” he said.

In August, Turkey launched an offensive codenamed Operation Euphrates Shield with a view to ousting Daesh militants from Syria’s northern border area.

The operation has seen the Turkish military support the Free Syrian Army with special forces, airstrikes, artillery and tanks.

Rifai thinks that the Daesh terrorist group was the product of foreign intelligence services.

“The group was designed to overrun vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq and hand them over to the terrorist PYD group in Syria and Iraq’s Shia militias,” he alleged.

The Syrian opposition leader went on to accuse Shia Iran of stoking sectarianism in the region.

“Although the Iranian leadership tends to avoid using sectarian speeches, its actions are purely sectarian,” he said.

Iran is a staunch supporter of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

For the past five years, Iranian troops, along with members of Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah group, have been fighting alongside regime forces in Syria.