TEHRAN - Hossein Mousavian, a Middle East expert who now works as a researcher at Princeton University researcher, has urged the Tehran-Ankara-Moscow coalition to immediately put an end to the conflict in Syria now that the United States has decided to withdraw its troops from the country.

“The U.S. pullout from Syria will be beneficial to the triangle of Tehran-Ankara-Moscow if they can deepen cooperation and manage the Syrian crisis immediately,” he told ISNA in an interview published on Sunday.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that U.S. troops had defeated the Daesh terrorists in Syria and he sought to pull some 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria.

Mousavian said that there are various views in the U.S. on the issue if withdrawal of forces from Syria.

“The Pentagon and a majority in Congress are against this decision. The U.S. National Security Council has not taken a decision yet, because of internal differences,” he said.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi has welcomed Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, saying the U.S. military presence in the Middle East fuels insecurity in the region.

“Basically, U.S. forces’ arrival and presence in the region was a wrong, illogical, tension-provoking and crisis-inducing move from the outset, and has always been one of the key contributors to instability and insecurity in the region,” said Qassemi, the Foreign Ministry website reported on Saturday.

Iran, Russia and Turkey, known as the Astana Group, have succeeded to bring the warring sides in Syria to the negotiating table and guarantee ceasefire in some parts of the country.

The foreign ministers of the three countries met in the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva on December 18 for talks on the proposed Syrian constitutional committee and a following election. The sides agreed to meet early next year.

The sides should still agree on the makeup of the 150-memebr constitutional committee. 

The talks were chaired by the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.
 
NA/PA