Syria Giving Up Weapons Is Because Of Russia,It Has nothing To Do With U.S Threats,Says Assad

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flew into Geneva on Thursday to hear Russia’s plans to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons and avert U.S.-led military strikes, an initiative that has transformed diplomacy in the two-and-a-half-year-old civil war.

Kerry would insist any deal must force Syria to take rapid steps to show it is serious about abandoning its chemical arsenal, senior U.S. officials said ahead of Kerry’s talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Among the first steps Washington wants, one U.S. official said, is for Bashar al-Assad’s government to make a quick, complete, public declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles as a prelude to allowing them to be inspected and neutralized.

This week’s eleventh-hour Russian initiative interrupted a Western march to war, persuading President Barack Obama to put on hold a plan for military strikes to punish Assad for a poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians on Aug. 21.

Syria, which denies it was behind that attack, has agreed to Moscow’s proposal that it give up its chemical weapons stocks, averting what would have been the first direct Western intervention in a war that has killed more than 100,000 people.

Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Assad as saying he had agreed because of Moscow’s diplomacy, not Washington’s threats.

“Syria is placing its chemical weapons under international control because of Russia. The U.S. threats did not influence the decision,” Interfax quoted him as telling Russia’s state-run Rossiya-24 television channel.

A version of the Russian plan that leaked to the newspaper Kommersant described four stages: Syria would join the world body that enforces a chemical weapons ban, declare production and storage sites, invite inspectors, and then decide with the inspectors how and by whom stockpiles would be destroyed.