MOSCOW, November 18. /TASS/. Proposals of Russia, the United States and other countries as to who should be considered terrorists in Syria coincide to a large extent, and the list will finally be drawn up by Jordan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
"Under an agreement reached in Vienna, participants in the Syrian Support Group will send their considerations as to who they consider as terrorist organizations apart from Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra. The process will be coordinated by Jordan," the foreign minister said.
"We have relayed our proposals to the partners quite a long time ago, a couple of weeks ago we received proposals from our American colleagues and some others. They coincided to a large extent," he said.
He said the difficulty in drawing up the list was that terrorist organizations were often changing their colors, trying to appear in the eyes of the world community as moderate opposition.
"I hope our American colleagues will be able to coordinate this process so that to draw up the list and submit it to the UN Security Council," he continued.
"Participants in the Syrian Support Group have an understanding that when we reach consensus, it will be necessary to put these organizations on the terrorist list of the UN Security Council along with IS and Jabhat al-Nusra on which the general consensus was reached, ," the top diplomat said.
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Moscow expects West to stop linking fight against IS with Assad’s fate
Russia hopes that the West will now stop linking the fight against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group with the fate of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
"I hope that the change in the position of our Western colleagues, which, unfortunately, has been caused by the terrible acts of terrorism, will be also observed among our other Western partners; hopefully, they will abandon their stance that a real fight against IS and similar groups is possible only when the fate of Bashar Assad is decided," the minister said.
"We have discussed this in detail with our American colleagues who actively promoted this logic. Now, in my opinion, there is no doubt that it is simply unacceptable to put forward preconditions for uniting in the fight against terrorists, first of all represented by the so-called Islamic state," Lavrov said. "This, of course, is not an Islamic state at all."
"Our common responsibility is not to let it become a state, as it is trying to create its caliphate that would threaten a great number countries and the entire human civilisation," Lavrov said.
Russia hopes political process in Syria to get underway by January 1
Russia hopes that the political process in Syria will get underway within the deadline identified at the Vienna meeting, by January 1, 2016, Sergey Lavrov said.
"The Vienna document expresses the hope that the launch of this process will take place on a date close to January 1, 2016. This is not an ultimatum but a benchmark, but we hope to stick to it," Lavrov said.
"The more we delay the launch of the political process between the Syrian government and the opposition, the worse for the Syrian people," he added.