ONCUPINAR, Turkey: French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called Friday for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime to be “smashed fast” as he visited Turkey’s largest refugee camp near the border.
“The Syrian regime should be smashed fast,” Fabius told reporters. “After hearing the refugees and their account of the massacres of the regime, Mr. Bashar Assad doesn’t deserve to be on this earth.”
| Sure Sparky. When is the Foreign Legion landing in Aleppo? |
“It is an operation of destruction of an entire people that he is trying to accomplish,” he said.
Fabius made the remarks at a refugee camp near the Oncupinar border crossing in Kilis province, where he met a number of Syrian refugees appealing to France for weapons and aid to fight the Damascus regime. In response to the demands, the top diplomat said his country was spending efforts in the political and humanitarian fields, but France could not accept continuation of Assad’s “massacre.”
“The sooner this regime leaves, the better,” he said.
| Nice words. What are you doing about it? |
The Oncupinar camp is one of several refugee settlements in TurkeyÂ’s border provinces and houses around 12,000 people in prefabricated buildings.
Fabius had previously visited Jordan and Lebanon, where he had renewed calls for Assad to go in the face of his regime’s relentless onslaught against Syrian civilians and predicted more “spectacular” defections to come soon. Fabius was referring to the recent defections of Assad’s prime minister Riad Hijab and general Manaf Tlass, his childhood friend and the son of a close aide of Assad’s father Hafez, who ruled Syria with an iron fist.
The high-level clearance into Oncupinar camp, a Turkish diplomat told AFP, was the result of the improvement in French-Turkish ties after a tumultous period during the term of the previous French president Nicolas Sarkozy. |