AMMAN – Britain and Qatar urged President Bashar Al-Assad to step down, as major world powers gathered on Wednesday to seek ways toward a peaceful end to Syria's conflict. And the United States urged Assad to make a “commitment to find peace” in a country whose conflict has killed more than 94,000 people and threatens to spill beyond its borders. “It is the longstanding view of the UK that Assad needs to go, and we have never been able to see any solution which involves him staying,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in Amman ahead of a Friends of Syria meeting to discuss a US-Russian proposal for peace talks. Qatar, a key supporter of the Syrian opposition, echoed that. “A political solution must be reached to end the conflict and meet the aspirations of the Syrian people who, as we know, demand changing the regime and changing President Bashar Al-Assad, who insists on killing his people,” Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem Al-Thani said in Doha. Western governments are ready to increase support to opponents of Assad if he rejects a political solution to Syria's civil war, US Secretary of State John Kerry said. Kerry said recent military gains by Assad's forces were only temporary and that if the Syrian leader believed that the counter-offensives against the rebels would be decisive, “then he is miscalculating”. “In the event that we can't find that way forward, in the event that the Assad regime is unwilling to negotiate Geneva 1 in good faith, we will also talk about our continued support and growing support for the opposition in order to permit them to continue to be able to fight for the freedom of their country,” Kerry told a news conference. He said several thousand fighters from the Lebanese group Hezbollah were taking part in the Syrian conflict with active Iranian support on the ground. “Just last week, obviously, Hezbollah intervened very, very significantly,” he said. “There are several thousands of Hezbollah militia forces on the ground in Syria who are contributing to this violence and we condemn that.” — Agencies
