Has United States Finally Abandoned Their Role In World Peace? Barack Obama Empty Threat To 'Apply More Pressure' On Assad Regime!

US president threatens to "apply more pressure" on the Assad regime as Syrian peace talks end with no progress.

President Obama & King Abdullah Of Jordan.

President Barack Obama has threatened to "apply more pressure" on the Assad regime as the second round of Syrian peace talks ended with no progress and no date set for a third.

Lakhdar al-Brahimi, the UN envoy chairing the talks, apologised to the Syrian people for the failure to break the stalemate in Geneva, while France said the regime had blocked any possibility of progress and Britain described the failure as a "serious setback".

Washington's Arab allies have already decided to unlock more arms supplies for rebel groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad, including militarily significant portable anti-aircraft missiles that could be used against planes attacking civilians, according to diplomats.

Combined with an upsurge in fighting, particularly an intensive regime aerial bombardment of Aleppo in the north and the city of Yabroud near the Lebanese border, the latest development will further suspicions that the peace talks have become an excuse to deepen the conflict rather than end it.

"We're going to have to solve the underlying problem – a regime led by Bashar al-Assad that has shown very little regard for the well-being of his people," Mr Obama said after a meeting in California with King Abdullah of Jordan, Syria's neighbour and a key route for arms supplies to the rebels.

"There will be some intermediate steps that we can take to apply more pressure to the Assad regime, and we're going to be continuing to work with all the parties concerned to try to move forward on a diplomatic solution."

Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in pledging military support for the rebels fighting the regime in Syria, but its actual supplies of weaponry have been sporadic. Most of the rebels' equipment has been either looted from the regime, carried over by defectors or bought with money raised by private donors, including in the Gulf states.

In part, Saudi Arabia has been stopped from sending heavy weaponry including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles by the United States, its own major arms supplier, which fears they will end up in the hands of jihadists.

However, a large consignment of weapons from the former Yugoslavia were supplied through Jordan a year ago, and in late May or early June a significant batch of Russian Konkurs anti-tank guided missiles paid for by Saudi Arabia played a significant role in a number of battles north of Aleppo.

According to the Wall Street Journal, citing a briefing by a western diplomat, Chinese-made shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles are the next step up. "New stuff is arriving imminently," the diplomat is quoted as saying.

The meeting between Mr Obama and King Abdullah of Jordan is unlikely to be a coincidence. King Abdullah is partly dependent on Saudi Arabian financing as well as American military backing for holding his fragile, resource-poor country together, but has also been concerned about the effect of the Syrian civil war spilling over into his territory.

It is already home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees; half his population or more is meanwhile made up of Palestinian refugees.

At the same time as making his pledge to increase support for the Syrian rebels, Mr Obama pledged $1 billion (£600 million) in loan guarantees to Jordan.

His words on continuing to press for regime change mark an apparently clear rejection of voices in Washington saying the rise of jihadism within the rebel movement means Washington should support Mr Assad staying in power.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, with strong British diplomatic support, have instead forged an alternative policy of rebuilding the non-jihadist rebels. They in turn have attacked a series of bases of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the most militant group.

On Friday, they drove them out of two towns north of Aleppo, Anadan and Hreitan. The ISIS fighters there fled to the town of Aazaz on the Turkish border, where ISIS subsequently beheaded at least two captives, perhaps as revenge, a rebel spokesman said.

The end of the second round of talks in Geneva without any progress was widely predicted. Mr Brahimi, the UN envoy chairing them, made profuse apologies that low expectations had been met.

"I'm very, very sorry," Mr Brahimi said. "I think it is better that every side goes back and reflects, and takes their responsibility: do they want this process to continue or not?" Although both sides agreed to meet again, there was no date set and even the agenda was disputed. Unusually, Mr Brahimi openly placed more blame on one side, the regime, than the other.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, described the failure to establish a new round of Geneva talks as a "serious setback".

"This cannot be the end of the road. With the war in Syria causing more death and destruction every day, we owe it to the people of Syria to do all we can to make progress towards a political solution," the Foreign Secretary said in a statement.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said he blamed the "attitude of the Syrian regime, which blocked any progress on establishing a transition government and stepped up violence and acts of terror against the civilian population".

Both sides committed to talking about the fight against terrorism, the key regime demand, and a transitional governing body, as demanded by the opposition, but Mr Brahimi added that he had wanted to agree to discuss the first issue on day one of the next round, whenever it was, and the second on the second day.

"Unfortunately the government has refused, which raises the suspicion of the opposition that in fact the government doesn't want to discuss the TGB (transitional governing body) at all," he added.

Bashar Jaafari, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations and one of its principal spokesmen at the talks, said the opposition had "insisted on its own interpretation of the agenda" – a reference to the opposition's position that any transitional governing body cannot include President Assad, the talks' key sticking point.

Cynicism about the talks has only been fuelled by the regime's bombardment of Aleppo, which has killed 400 people, including women and children, in the last fortnight. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said the total number of deaths in the war had now passed 140,000, with the period since the Geneva talks started the bloodiest. www.telegraph.co.uk