MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Monday, Kerry urged Syrian opposition groups to separate from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly named al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and he reiterated calls for all parties to abide by the ceasefire in war-torn Syria.
"As they separate, or as we work to know better exactly who's where, there are refined ways that we can have to actually make sure we're taking on Nusra and not taking on the legitimate opposition," Kerry told the NPR broadcaster.
He added that sponsors of Syrian opposition groups, such as Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, would encourage them to make "common-sense decisions."
On September 9, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kerry announced a new peace plan to address the five-year conflict in Syria that called for a ceasefire to come into force on Monday.
Failure of Peace Talks on Syria May Escalate Sectarian Conflicts in Middle East
The failure to bring peace to war-torn Syria through negotiations may increase the risk of sectarian conflicts in the Middle East and create Kurdish, Sunni and other enclaves, John Kerry said.
"If you fail to get a cessation in place now and we cannot get to the table, then the fighting is going to increase significantly… You'll have massive potential increased sectarian conflicts — Sunni-Shia, Iran," Kerry said.
Conflicting sides in the region would become unleashed in case of a failure in the peace process, the US state secretary added.
"You could wind up with enclaves, conceivably a Kurd area, a Sunni and maybe even Sunni extremist area, a moderate-slash-whatever you want to call the western enclave that [Syrian President Bashar] Assad controls," Kerry noted.
Moreover, such a failure would add up to the current refugees’ flow to Europe, Kerry warned. It can further raise the level of extremism in the European countries and Russia, "where you have 2,000 [Chechens] who are fighting in Syria now, and they're worried about them coming home."
The next ministerial meeting on Syria is due to be held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 21 and is expected to become a great opportunity for the resumption of the negotiations in Geneva.
