BERLIN (Sputnik) — US special envoy for the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, Brett McGurk, said earlier that the use of NATO’s surveillance aircraft to back the coalition could be brought up at the July summit.
"It is a pretext. It is really about making NATO part of the Syrian operation," Harald Kujat, ex-chief of the NATO Military Committee and former inspector general of the German military said.
He warned that NATO’s intervention could create military precedents detached from its political line at the time when the Syrian peace process is on shaky ground. "This is creating risks because negotiations are very unstable," Kujat said.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said after a North Atlantic Council meeting almost two weeks ago that member states were discussing how exactly to provide direct support to coalition forces without having NATO warplanes in the Syrian airspace.
