President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to
impose a new cease-fire in southwest Syria in a bid to resolve that
nation's intractable civil war, trying again to cooperate in an area
where the two countries have repeatedly failed in the past.
Speaking
after Trump and Putin met at the Group of 20 summit in Germany on
Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson portrayed the truce as a first
step toward broader cooperation with Russia in Syria, as the Islamic
State faces defeat. The agreement goes into effect July 9.
"People
are getting tired, they're getting weary of conflict and I think we
have an opportunity, we hope, to create the conditions - and this area
in the south is our first show of success," Tillerson told reporters in
Hamburg. "We're hoping we can replicate that elsewhere."
Tillerson
reiterated the U.S. belief that Syrian President Bashar Assad should
not be part of the country's political future, a key sticking point with
Russia in the past. It was Russia's intervention on Assad's behalf in
late 2015 that shored up his regime and enabled it to regain territory
from jihadists and other rebels.
Despite the optimism emerging
from the Hamburg meeting, recent history has shown how hard it is to
make a truce in Syria stick. President Barack Obama's administration
announced a cease-fire agreement last year with Putin's government. That
plan collapsed almost immediately in the wake of a U.S.-led coalition
airstrike that killed about 60 Syrian soldiers, and which the Americans
said was accidental, and a subsequent Syrian attack on a humanitarian
aid convoy.
Previous disputes between the U.S. and Russia since
Trump took office have led to breakdowns in communication over the two
countries' use of force in Syria. Trump's decision in April to launch a
cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base following a chemical weapons
attack blamed on Assad's forces infuriated Moscow, as did a later U.S.
shoot-down of a Syrian fighter jet.
In addition, the 6-year-old
civil war has transformed into one of the most complex battlefields in
modern history, populated with Islamic State militants, Kurdish
fighters, other armed opposition groups of various stripes, and military
forces from Russia, Turkey, Iran and the U.S. An estimated 470,000
people, including 55,000 children, have been killed, according to the
Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Tillerson said he believed this
cease-fire will succeed where others failed because the war against the
Islamic State is winding down and all sides are thinking more about
Syria's future.
He only briefly mentioned the many fractured
opposition groups that are battling Assad for control across the
country. It was the chaos sparked by that conflict that allowed the
Islamic State to take root in Syria, and the sides haven't made any
progress toward talks on resolving the country's political future.
"We'll
see what happens as to the ability to hold the cease-fire but I think
part of what's different is where we are relative to the whole war
against ISIS, where we are in terms of the opposition's position,"
Tillerson said.
The Hamburg meeting comes at a low point in
recent U.S.-Russia relations, amid a federal investigation and
congressional probes into Russian interference in last year's American
presidential elections. Those probes have spawned related inquiries into
connections between the Trump campaign and White House officials and
Russians.
"The agreements reached during the meeting on the
de-escalation zones give hope that there can be more steps to join our
effort in Syria," said Viktor Ozerov, chairman of the defense committee
in the upper house of Russia's parliament, according to the state-run
RIA Novosti news agency. "This shows the high level of trust between the
parties."
The cease-fire deal would allow Trump to say that he
worked toward a positive outcome with Putin, even as many other thorny
issues remain on the table -- not least the U.S. sanctions against
Russia over its intervention in Ukraine.
Then-U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had
negotiated last year's truce as a first step toward collaboration in
stamping out the Islamic State in Syria, ending the civil war and
stemming the exodus of refugees.
Trump's team went into Friday's
closely watched meeting with a similar goal. The talks with Putin,
slated to last about a half-hour, eventually ended after about two hours
and 15 minutes.
