Britain Won't Form Alliance With Assad in Fight Against Islamic State: Hammond
Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond rejected the idea of joining Syria's President Bashar al-Assad as an ally in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) militants.
Hammond, in an interview on the BBC Radio's World at One, said that doing so would not "practical, sensible or helpful".
The idea was proposed following the beheading of US journalist James Foley. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is one of his Conservative predecessors as foreign secretary, made the suggestion; however, it did not interest the UK government at all.
"I think we have to be harshly realistic, which means we don't pretend we are chums of the Syrian regime - they are a ghastly regime, they are a horrid regime - but just as during the second world war Churchill and Roosevelt swallowed hard and dealt with Stalin, with the Soviet Union, not because they had any naivety about what Stalin represented but because that was necessary in order to defeat Hitler, and history judged them right in coming to that difficult but necessary judgment," Rifkind said.
On the other hand, former Army Chief Richard Dannatt also echoed the same, calling for Britain to consider some kind of alliance with Assad; to which Hammond warned saying it would only intensify sectarian rifts in the region.
"We may very well find that we are fighting, on some occasions, the same people that [Assad] is, but that doesn't make us his ally. It would not be practical, sensible or helpful to even think about going down that route," Hammond said, The Guardian reports.
"One of the first things you learn in the Middle East is that my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. It would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of IS," he added.
Hammond further said that Britain does not seek arming moderate fighters in Syria's civil war, and stressed that Western troops on the ground in Iraq would only contribute to making the situation worse.
