President Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin ripped the gloves off as they clashed over the Syrian conflict in separate speeches at the United Nations on Monday, just hours before they got together there for their first formal meeting in two years.
Obama blasted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal tactics as he addressed the packed General Assembly’s gathering of world leaders and delegates. “We’re told that such retrenchment is required to beat back disorder, that it’s the only way to stamp out terrorism,” Obama said in a barely veiled reference to Putin, a longtime Assad ally.
“In accordance with this logic, we should support tyrants like Bashar al-Assad, who drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children, because the alternative is surely worse,” he said.
Obama then upped the ante by bluntly calling out Russia for “flagrantly” violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“Look at the results. The Ukrainian people are more interested than ever in aligning with Europe instead of Russia. Sanctions have led to capital flight, a contracting economy, a fallen ruble and the immigration of more educated Russians,” the president said in his blistering 43-minute speech. When Putin took the podium, he laid out a different view of Assad, who is clinging to power as he battles insurgents while ISIS controls Syrian territory.
“We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and [Kurdish] militia are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria,” Putin said, speaking for 23 minutes in Russian.
Assad’s forces — the same ones that Obama had just accused of brutality against the Syrian people — were “valiantly fighting terrorism face to face,” the defiant Russian president insisted. “It would be a mistake not to cooperate with the Syrian government. This is not about Russia’s ambitions, but about the recognition of the fact that we can no longer tolerate the urgent state of affairs in the world,” Read Full Gist Here @ nypost
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