MOSCOW – Russia declared Thursday that its goal is to end the bloody conflict in Syria, not help the nation's embattled president cling to power at all costs. “We are not preoccupied that much with the fate of the Assad regime; we realize what's going on there and that the family has been in power for 40 years,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a televised news conference in Moscow. “Undoubtedly, there is a call for changes.” “We are advocating the solution that would prevent the collapse of the region and the continuous civil war. Not retain (President Bashar) Al-Assad and his regime,” Putin said signaling a major policy shift on Syria. “We are worried about another thing: what happens next,” he said. “We don't want to see the opposition come to power and start fighting the government that becomes the opposition, so that it goes on forever.” Russia wants “people to come to an agreement on how they will live further and how they will ensure their safety and their participation in governing the country and then start changing the current order based on those agreements.” Assad has not visited Moscow a lot in his tenure, and Russia does not have “special economic relations” with Syria, according to Putin. The Russian president's comments came just a week after Russia's top envoy for Syria was quoted as saying Assad's forces were losing control of the country. Although the Foreign Ministry backpedaled on that statement, analysts have suggested for months that the Kremlin is resigned to losing its longtime ally. At his annual hours-long news conference, Putin said Moscow stands for a settlement that would “prevent the country from breakup and an endless civil war. Agreements based on a military victory can't be effective,” he said. Meanwhile, a new UN human rights report said Thursday that Syria's civil war is increasingly turning into a sectarian conflict pitting majority Sunni rebels against government forces supported by the country's religious and ethnic minorities. Sergio Pinheiro, who heads an independent commission investigating abuses, said in Brussels that the bulk of the victims of the nearly two-year war were civilians, and blamed both sides for abuses including torture and illegal executions. Activists say about 40,000 people have died on both sides since the conflict erupted in March 2011. The report, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, found that foreign fighters, many linked to extremist Sunni groups, are infiltrating into Syria. They are operating in independent units that coordinate actions with the Free Syrian Army — the Western-backed armed group which is the rebels' main military force. Although Pinheiro visited Damascus, the panel was not allowed into Syria and was forced to compile its report — which covers Sept. 28 to Dec. 16 — from interviews with Syrians who have fled the conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have escaped into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Pinheiro noted that anti-government rebels were hiding in Syrian cities where they were “failing to distinguish themselves” from the civilian population, triggering strikes by government artillery and the air force. While the sectarian divide is sharpest between the Sunnis and Allawite communities — from which most of the senior government and military leaders hail — other minority groups have been increasingly drawn into the conflict, the report said. “As battles between government and anti-government armed groups approach the end of their second year, the conflict has become overtly sectarian in nature,” it said, adding that Christians, Armenians, Druze and others have largely aligned themselves with Assad's regime. – Agencies
