Obama’s Red Line

May 16, 2013

• Provocative moves in Syria by Israel, West could lead to World War III
By Ralph Forbes
In early May the Middle East crackled with explosions, threatening to engulf the entire region in a catastrophic war, after pro-Israeli forces in Washington claimed the Syrian government had used chemical weapons on its own people, followed by Israel unleashing waves of sneak attacks against Syria.
Contrary to mainstream media propaganda, the Syrian loyalists, led by President Bashar al-Assad, are beating the Mossad-backed, CIA-sponsored “Free Syrian Army” terrorists, although Israel has desperately tried to embroil America into salvaging its plot to engulf the Middle East in flames.
But with Syria winning the war, the Western powers resorted to setting up a false-flag chemical attack to convince America to start yet another war. That plan failed when Carla del Ponte, the respected former chief prosecutor of two United Nations (UN) international criminal law tribunals, and now a member of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, said in a May 5 interview with Italian-Swiss broadcaster RSI, “The rebels used chemical weapons, sarin gas. . . . There is no evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons.”
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Assad called on the UN to investigate a chemical weapons attack near Aleppo in March, which he says was carried out by rebel groups, but was rebuffed. Numerous “red-line” false-flag allegations and doctored videos have been exposed as war propaganda produced by the U.S. military-intelligence-security apparatus and then promoted by the Zionist-controlled mainstream media.
The plan for a broad Middle East war was meticulously spelled out in a Brookings Institution document, “Which Path to Persia?” So far, though, these gambits have failed since the Western powers and Israel have been unable to provoke Iran or Syria into firing the first shot. Iran has exercised great restraint even while crippled by Western-backed economic sanctions.
Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, has written of leaked intelligence describing terrorist intervention in Syria by the CIA and Britain’s MI6 spy agency. UK mercenary firm Britam was identified as conspiring with Qatar to plant a poison-gas bomb in Syria and blame the Russians for supplying it, so Syria could be framed for crossing President Barack Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons.
After this failed, the Israelis launched multiple air attacks on Syria, claiming they needed to keep missiles out of the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. In fact, Israel was trying to goad the Syrian military into widening hostilities and force U.S. intervention.
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Ralph Forbes is a freelance writer based in Arkansas. He is also a member of AFP’s Southern Bureau. Contact him at rforbes@centurytel.net.

Rebels film execution of 11 Syrian soldiers, as Obama continues anti-Assad rhetoric
By RT
An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube on May 16, 2013 by user @dirtytrainers
As a new video is published showing fighters of the Al Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front in Syria executing 11 men they say are Bashar Assad’s soldiers, Obama talks to Turkey’s Erdogan, renewing threats of action against the Syrian government.
The video, which was posted on YouTube on Thursday, is believed to have been filmed in the eastern Deir-al Zor province and appears to date from some time in 2012, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with a network of activists in Syria.
The footage shows the commander, his face obscured in a black balaclava, shooting each prisoner in the back of the head as they kneel blindfolded lined up in the sand.
The Islamic militants shout “God is great” each time a man is shot. In some cases the executioner comes back and fires more bullets to make sure they are dead. The Al Nusra Front, which is thought to be behind the footage, has links to Al-Qaeda, and itself has ended up on America’s terrorism list in December 2012.
Rami Abderrahman, the head of the Observatory, told Reuters that the Al Nusra Front has been releasing several videos of their gruesome operations.
The Observatory said that such videos have become increasingly common in Syria’s bloody civil war, which has now claimed 80,000 lives, according to latest UN estimates.
The Nusra video is the second to appear online in the last two days to show executions by fighters who claim links to al-Qaeda.

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube on May 16, 2013 by user @dirtytrainers
It comes after horrific footage was released on Sunday of a Syrian rebel commander apparently eating one of the lungs of a dead government fighter. Time magazine said they had first seen the footage in April and identified the man as Khaled al-Hamad. Hamad admitted to the magazine that he had mutilated the corpse of the soldier as an act of revenge for allegedly defiling a naked woman and her daughter.
The footage was swiftly condemned by the Syrian opposition.
Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch told the Guardian that it is “not enough for Syria’s opposition to condemn such behavior or blame it on violence by the government. The opposition forces need to act firmly to stop such abuses.”
But Hamad, who is also known as Abu Sakkar, has also received support amongst the more hardline rebels in Syria. Sakkar’s supporters often make portraits of him with the inscription “We Love You”.
Obama repeats warnings of a ‘military option’
The controversy comes as a joint news conference with Turkish Prime Minster, Tayyip Erdogan, and President Obama was held Thursday. Obama said that the US reserves the right to resort to diplomatic and military options if there is conclusive proof that Assad has used chemical weapons.
"There are a whole range of options that the United States is already engaged in…  And I reserve the options of taking additional steps, both diplomatic and military, because those chemical weapons inside of Syria also threaten our security over the long term as well as our allies and friends and neighbors."

US President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, May 16, 2013. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)
Erdogan, for his part, added that “ending this bloody process in Syria and meeting the legitimate demands of the people by establishing a new government are two areas where we are in full agreement with the US. We also agree that we have to prevent Syria from becoming an area for terrorist organizations. We also agree that chemical weapons should not be used.”
But Aleksandr Lukashevich, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said Monday that the accusation that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons could be a sign that public opinion is being prepared for the possibility of military intervention in Syria.
“A lot of reasoning appeared in a number of Arab and other international mass media regarding the use of chemical weapons in the standoff between the government forces and the opposition guerillas,” he warned.
Speaking to Lebanon's Al Mayadeen TV channel Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow will make no “backstage” agreements on Syria in exchange for Western concessions on missile defense or any other disputed issues.
“This is not serious. I think that those who try suggest that indulge in wishful thinking,” Lavrov said in an interview with Lebanon's Al Mayadeen TV channel.
“Everyone knows well that Russia’s stance on a whole range of crucial issues is not opportunistic,” the Russian top diplomat emphasized. 
On Wednesday, the UN passed resolution 6a, which has condemned Assad’s regime for re-escalating the Syrian conflict. The document was passed with a vote of 107 to 12, and with 59 abstaining.
The support was far lower than a resolution last august, which condemned Assad for cracking down on dissent. The decline in support is seen as a sign of growing unease at increasing extremism among Syria’s fractious rebels.
Russia voted against this year’s resolution, saying it was "counterproductive and irresponsible" to promote a one-sided resolution when Moscow and Washington are trying to get the Syrian government and opposition to agree to negotiations.
At a meeting in Geneva in June last year the major world powers reached a degree of consent between the positions of Russia and the West who do not often see eye to eye on Syria. They agreed that any future government in Syria could include members of the current regime as well as opposition groups. There was also no specific demand that Assad must step down – something the West has insisted on – and instead an agreement pushed by Russia and China that the future makeup of any Syrian government would be decided by the Syrian people.

Clashes break out in West Bank on Nakba Day
By presstv
Palestinian women hold symbolic keys and chant "the right of return will not die," during a rally to mark the Nakba Day in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 15, 2013.
Wed May 15, 2013 1:28PM
LAST UPDATE
Every year on May 15, Palestinians all over the world hold demonstrations to commemorate Nakba Day, which marks the anniversary of the forcible eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland by Israelis and the creation of Israel in 1948."
Clashes have erupted outside the Israeli-operated Ofer prison in northern West Bank after Israeli forces attacked Palestinians marking the 65th anniversary of the Nakba Day.
Similar clashes erupted near the al-Aqsa Mosque in East al-Quds (Jerusalem) on Wednesday, reports said.
Rallies commemorating the Nakba Day, which means the Day of Catastrophe, were also held in the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and al-Khalil (Hebron).
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip also took to the streets to voice their anger against the Israeli occupation of their land.
Similar demonstrations were held in some neighboring countries.
The Israeli regime has deployed additional troops to East al-Quds and security is tight at Qalandia checkpoint of north al-Quds.
On Tuesday, Israeli forces attacked hundreds of Palestinians who were trying to mark the day in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Every year on May 15, Palestinians all over the world hold demonstrations to commemorate Nakba Day, which marks the anniversary of the forcible eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland by Israelis and the creation of Israel in 1948.
On May 15, 1948, Israeli forces displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, forcing them to flee to different neighboring countries.
Israeli soldiers also wiped nearly 500 Palestinian villages and towns off the map, leaving an estimated total of 4.7 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants dreaming of an eventual return to their ancestral homeland more than six decades later.

Nuclear Terror in the Middle East

By Nick Turse

In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.
This could be Tehran, or what’s left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.
Iranian cities - owing to geography, climate, building construction, and population densities - are particularly vulnerable to nuclear
attack, according to a new study, "Nuclear War Between Israel and Iran: Lethality Beyond the Pale," published in the journal Conflict and Health by researchers from the University of Georgia and Harvard University. It is the first publicly released scientific assessment of what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean for people in the region.
Its scenarios are staggering. An Israeli attack on the Iranian capital of Tehran using five 500-kiloton weapons would, the study estimates, kill seven million people - 86% of the population - and leave close to 800,000 wounded. A strike with five 250-kiloton weapons would kill an estimated 5.6 million and injure 1.6 million, according to predictions made using an advanced software package designed to calculate mass casualties from a nuclear detonation.
Estimates of the civilian toll in other Iranian cities are even more horrendous. A nuclear assault on the city of Arak, the site of a heavy water plant central to Iran's nuclear program, would potentially kill 93% of its 424,000 residents. Three 100-kiloton nuclear weapons hitting the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas would slaughter an estimated 94% of its 468,000 citizens, leaving just 1% of the population uninjured. A multi-weapon strike on Kermanshah, a Kurdish city with a population of 752,000, would result in an almost unfathomable 99.9% casualty rate.
Cham Dallas, the director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia and lead author of the study, says that the projections are the most catastrophic he's seen in more than 30 years analyzing weapons of mass destruction and their potential effects. "The fatality rates are the highest of any nuke simulation I've ever done," he told me by phone from the nuclear disaster zone in Fukushima, Japan, where he was doing research. "It's the perfect storm for high fatality rates".
Israel has never confirmed or denied possessing nuclear weapons, but is widely known to have up to several hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal. Iran has no nuclear weapons and its leaders claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes only. Published reports suggest that American intelligence agencies and Israel's intelligence service are in agreement: Iran suspended its nuclear weapons development program in 2003.
Dallas and his colleagues nonetheless ran simulations for potential Iranian nuclear strikes on the Israeli cities of Beer Sheva, Haifa, and Tel Aviv using much smaller 15-kiloton weapons, similar in strength to those dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Their analyses suggest that, in Beer Shiva, half of the population of 209,000 would be killed and one-sixth injured. Haifa would see similar casualty ratios, including 40,000 trauma victims. A strike on Tel Aviv with two 15-kiloton weapons would potentially slaughter 17% of the population - nearly 230,000 people. Close to 150,000 residents would likely be injured.
These forecasts, like those for Iranian cities, are difficult even for experts to assess. "Obviously, accurate predictions of casualty and fatality estimates are next to impossible to obtain," says Dr Glen Reeves, a longtime consultant on the medical effects of radiation for the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, who was not involved in the research. "I think their estimates are probably high but not impossibly so".
According to Paul Carroll of the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based foundation that advocates for nuclear disarmament, "the results would be catastrophic" if major Iranian cities were attacked with modern nuclear weapons. "I don't see 75% [fatality rates as] being out of the question," says Carroll, after factoring in the longer-term effects of radiation sickness, burns, and a devastated medical infrastructure.
According to Dallas and his colleagues, the marked disparity between estimated fatalities in Israel and Iran can be explained by a number of factors. As a start, Israel is presumed to have extremely powerful nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery capabilities including long-range Jericho missiles, land-based cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and advanced aircraft with precision targeting technology.
The nature of Iranian cities also makes them exceptionally vulnerable to nuclear attack, according to the Conflict & Health study. Tehran, for instance, is home to 50% of Iran's industry, 30% of its public sector workers, and 50 colleges and universities. As a result, 12 million people live in or near the capital, most of them clustered in its core. Like most Iranian cities, Tehran has little urban sprawl, meaning residents tend to live and work in areas that would be subject to maximum devastation and would suffer high%ages of fatalities due to trauma as well as thermal burns caused by the flash of heat from an explosion.
Iran's topography, specifically mountains around cities, would obstruct the dissipation of the blast and heat from a nuclear explosion, intensifying the effects. Climatic conditions, especially high concentrations of airborne dust, would likely exacerbate thermal and radiation casualties as well as wound infections.
Nuclear horror: Then and now
The first nuclear attack on a civilian population center, the US strike on Hiroshima, left that city "uniformly and extensively devastated," according to a study carried out in the wake of the attacks by the US Strategic Bombing Survey.
"Practically the entire densely or moderately built-up portion of the city was leveled by blast and swept by fire ... The surprise, the collapse of many buildings, and the conflagration contributed to an unprecedented casualty rate". At the time, local health authorities reported that 60% of immediate deaths were due to flash or flame burns and medical investigators estimated that 15%-20% of the deaths were caused by radiation.
Witnesses "stated that people who were in the open directly under the explosion of the bomb were so severely burned that the skin was charred dark brown or black and that they died within a few minutes or hours," according to the 1946 report. "Among the survivors, the burned areas of the skin showed evidence of burns almost immediately after the explosion. At first there was marked redness, and other evidence of thermal burns appeared within the next few minutes or hours".
Many victims kept their arms outstretched because it was too painful to allow them to hang at their sides and rub against their bodies. One survivor recalled seeing victims "with both arms so severely burned that all the skin was hanging from their arms down to their nails, and others having faces swollen like bread, losing their eyesight. It was like ghosts walking in procession … Some jumped into a river because of their serious burns. The river was filled with the wounded and blood".
The number of fatalities at Hiroshima has been estimated at 140,000. A nuclear attack on Nagasaki three days later is thought to have killed 70,000. Today, according to Dallas, 15-kiloton nuclear weapons of the type used on Japan are referred to by experts as "firecracker nukes" due to their relative weakness.
In addition to killing more than 5.5 million people, a strike on Tehran involving five 250-kiloton weapons - each of them 16 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima - would result in an estimated 803,000 third-degree burn victims, with close to 300,000 others suffering second degree burns, and 750,000 to 880,000 people severely exposed to radiation. "Those people with thermal burns over most of their bodies we can't help," says Dallas.
"Most of these people are not going to survive … there is no saving them. They'll be in intense agony". As you move out further from the site of the blast, he says, "it actually gets worse. As the damage decreases, the pain increases, because you're not numb".
In a best case scenario, there would be 1,000 critically injured victims for every surviving doctor but "it will probably be worse," according to Dallas. Whatever remains of Tehran's healthcare system will be inundated with an estimated 1.5 million trauma sufferers. In a feat of understatement, the researchers report that survivors "presenting with combined injuries including either thermal burns or radiation poisoning are unlikely to have favorable outcomes".
Iranian government officials did not respond to a request for information about how Tehran would cope in the event of a nuclear attack. When asked if the US military could provide humanitarian aid to Iran after such a strike, a spokesman for Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, was circumspect. "US Central Command plans for a wide range of contingencies to be prepared to provide options to the Secretary of Defense and the President," he told this reporter.
But Frederick Burkle, a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Harvard University's School of Public Health, as well as a coauthor of the just-published article, is emphatic that the US military could not cope with the scale of the problem. "I must also say that no country or international body is prepared to offer the assistance that would be needed," he told me.
Dallas and his team spent five years working on their study. Their predictions were generated using a declassified version of a software package developed for the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, as well as other complementary software applications.
According to Glen Reeves, the software used fails to account for many of the vagaries and irregularities of an urban environment. These, he says, would mitigate some of the harmful effects. Examples would be buildings or cars providing protection from flash burns. He notes, however, that built-up areas can also exacerbate the number of deaths and injuries. Blast effects far weaker than what would be necessary to injure the lungs can, for instance, topple a house. "Your office building can collapse… before your eardrums pop!" notes Reeves.
The new study provides the only available scientific predictions to date about what a nuclear attack in the Middle East might actually mean. Dallas, who was previously the director of the Center for Mass Destruction Defense at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is quick to point out that the study received no US government funding or oversight. "No one wanted this research to happen," he adds.
Rattling sabers and nuclear denial
Frederick Burkle points out that, today, discussions about nuclear weapons in the Middle East almost exclusively center on whether or not Iran will produce an atomic bomb instead of "focusing on ensuring that there are options for them to embrace an alternate sense of security". He warns that the repercussions may be grave. "The longer this goes on the more we empower that singular thinking both within Iran and Israel."
Even if Iran were someday to build several small nuclear weapons, their utility would be limited. After all, analysts note that Israel would be capable of launching a post-attack response which would simply devastate Iran. Right now, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. Yet a preemptive Israeli nuclear strike against Iran also seems an unlikely prospect to most experts.
"Currently, there is little chance of a true nuclear war between the two nations," according to Paul Carroll of the Ploughshares Fund. Israel, he points out, would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons unless its very survival were at stake. "However, Israel's rhetoric about red lines and the threat of a nuclear Iran are something we need to worry about," he told me recently by email. "A military strike to defeat Iran's nuclear capacity would A) not work B) ensure that Iran WOULD then pursue a bomb (something they have not clearly decided to do yet) and C) risk a regional war."
Cham Dallas sees the threat in even starker terms. "The Iranians and the Israelis are both committed to conflict," he told me. He isn't alone in voicing concern.
"What will we do if Israel threatens Tehran with nuclear obliteration? ... A nuclear battle in the Middle East, one-sided or not, would be the most destabilizing military event since Pearl Harbor," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Tim Weiner in a recent op-ed for Bloomberg News.
"Our military commanders know a thousand ways in which a war could start between Israel and Iran … No one has ever fought a nuclear war, however. No one knows how to end one".
The Middle East is hardly the only site of potential nuclear catastrophe. Today, according to the Ploughshares Fund, there are an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons in the world. Russia reportedly has the most with 8,500; North Korea, the fewest with less than 10.
Donald Cook, the administrator for defense programs at the US National Nuclear Security Administration, recently confirmed that the United States possesses around 4,700 nuclear warheads. Other nuclear powers include rivals India and Pakistan, which stood on the brink of nuclear war in 2002. (Just this year, Indian government officials warned residents of Kashmir, the divided territory claimed by both nations, to prepare for a possible nuclear war.)
Recently, India and nuclear-armed neighbor China, which went to war with each other in the 1960s, again found themselves on the verge of a crisis due to a border dispute in a remote area of the Himalayas.
In a world awash in nuclear weapons, saber-rattling, brinkmanship, erratic behavior, miscalculations, technological errors, or errors in judgment could lead to a nuclear detonation and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, perhaps nowhere more so than in Iran.
"Not only would the immediate impacts be devastating, but the lingering effects and our ability to deal with them would be far more difficult than a 9/11 or earthquake/tsunami event," notes Paul Carroll. Radiation could turn areas of a country into no-go zones; healthcare infrastructure would be crippled or totally destroyed; and depending on climatic conditions and the prevailing winds, whole regions might have their agriculture poisoned. "One large bomb could do this, let alone a handful, say, in a South Asian conflict," he told me.
"I do believe that the longer we have these weapons and the more there are, the greater the chances that we will experience either an intentional attack (state-based or terrorist) or an accident," Carroll wrote in his email. "In many ways, we've been lucky since 1945. There have been some very close calls. But our luck won't hold forever".
Cham Dallas says there is an urgent need to grapple with the prospect of nuclear attacks, not later, but now. "There are going to be other big public health issues in the twenty-first century, but in the first third, this is it. It's a freight train coming down the tracks," he told me. "People don't want to face this. They're in denial."
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

Britain to double aid to Syrian opposition in 2014 - Cameron
By RT
US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron shake hands during a press conference at the White House in Washington, DC, May 13, 2013. (AFP Photo / Jim Watson)
Britain will double support for the Syrian opposition in 2014 with shipping more non-lethal military aid, PM David Cameron said as he and President Obama agreed to pressure on Assad while meeting in Washington.
Cameron has vowed an extra £10 million for non-lethal equipment and £30 million more for humanitarian assistance for Syrian people as the two politicians outlined further steps to “bring to an end the killing” of Syrian people.
“We will double non-lethal support to the Syrian opposition in the coming year. Armored vehicles, body armor and power generators are about to be shipped,” Cameron said at the press conference after an Oval Office meeting with US president Barack Obama.
Britain’s actions in Syria completely coincide with the US plans that the Obama administration voiced last week. Speaking after a meeting of the Syrian opposition, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would double its non-lethal aid to opposition forces in Syria in the coming year bringing the total sum to $250 million.
As for arming the Syrian opposition, Britain claims it has not “made decision to arm opposition groups in Syria”, however, Cameron said that it “is pushing for more flexibility in the EU arms embargo”.
“What we have done is we have amended the EU arms embargo in order that we can give technical assistance and technical advice,” he said.
He also said that UK will continue to examine the embargo to “see if we need to make further changes”.

Rebel fighters from the Al-Ezz bin Abdul Salam Brigade attend a training session at an undisclosed location near the al-Turkman mountains, in Syria's northern Latakia province, on April 24, 2013. (AFP Photo / Miguel Medina)
The current sanctions recently amended in April allow the supply of certain non-lethal equipment as well as technical and financing assistance related to it. However, a recently leaked six-page long draft proposal revealed the UK proposed two options to EU diplomats to amend the current embargo: the first, full exemption of Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary forces from the arms embargo and the second, to remove ‘non-lethal’ language to allow shipment lethal equipment to Syria.
Cameron said Assad had to realize there could be no military victory for his forces.
President Obama has backed Cameron’s words. From his side, he said that the “work to establish the use of chemical weapon in Syria” will continue and the findings “will help guide” the next steps.
Obama said the US would be "very persistent" in pursuing a peaceful political transition that leads to Assad's exit but leaves Syria "intact".
"I'm not promising it is going to be successful. Frankly, sometimes once the furies have been unleashed in a situation like we are seeing in Syria, it's very hard to put things back together," Obama said.
Both Cameron and Obama welcomed “successful” talks the Prime Minister had with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, at which the two leaders sought to hammer out a common approach to ending Syrian conflict. 
“There is now common ground between the US, UK, Russia and many others that whatever our differences we have the same aim, a stable, inclusive and peaceful Syria free from the scourge of extremists,” Cameron said.