Russia has begun to evacuate its citizens from Syria and its deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, has said the West is acting in the Islamic world like “a monkey with a grenade”.
Envoys from the US and its allies have told rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad that Western powers might attack Syria within days.
US forces in the region are “ready to go”, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said, as Washington and its European and Middle East partners honed their plans for punishing Assad for a major poison-gas attack last week that killed hundreds of civilians.
Several sources who attended a meeting in Istanbul on Monday between Syrian opposition leaders and diplomats said that the rebels were told to expect military action and get ready to negotiate a peace.
“The opposition was told in clear terms that action to deter further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime could come as early as the next few days, and that they should prepare for peace talks in Geneva,” one of the sources said.
Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition, met envoys from 11 states in the Friends of Syria group, including Robert Ford, the US ambassador to Syria, at an Istanbul hotel.
UN chemical weapons investigators, who finally crossed the frontline to take samples on Monday, put off a second trip to rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.
But Washington said it already held Assad responsible for a “moral obscenity”.
However, with Russian and Chinese opposition complicating efforts to satisfy international law – and Western voters wary of new, far-off wars – world leaders might not pull the trigger just yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron called parliament back from its summer recess for an emergency session on Syria tomorrow.
He and US President Barack Obama, as well as French President Francois Hollande, face tough questions about how an intervention, likely to be limited to air strikes, will end – and whether they risk handing power to anti-Western democracy Islamists if Assad is overthrown.
In an indication of support from Arab states that might help the Western powers argue the case for war against UN vetoes by Moscow and Beijing, the Arab League issued a statement holding Assad’s government fully responsible for the chemical-weapons attack.
Asked if US forces were ready to strike Syria just “like that”, Hagel told the BBC: “We are ready to go, like that. We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfil and comply with whatever option the president wants to take.”
Hagel said the US would have intelligence to present “very shortly” about last week’s mass poisoning. But he noted, after speaking to his British and French counterparts, that there was little doubt among US allies that “the most basic … international humanitarian standard was violated”.
Turkey, Syria’s neighbour and part of the US-led Nato military pact, called the Damascus deaths a “crime against humanity”.
The Syrian government, which denies using gas or obstructing the UN inspectors, said it would press on with its offensive against the rebels. Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said: “We have means of defending ourselves; we will surprise them.”
Russia has criticised Washington for cancelling bilateral talks on Syria that were set for today. A Russian aircraft is about to evacuate Russians and citizens of former Soviet states from Syria. The jet landed at the Latakia airport with 20t of humanitarian aid .
About 180 people who “have expressed a desire to leave Syria”, 100 of them Russian, are to be flown out. Russia evacuated its defence personnel from Syria in June.