Top Syria opponent seeks to unite dissidents

PARIS — Syria's exiled opposition chief told AFP he wants to pull together the country's divided dissidents to end the nearly five-year bloodbath, as he met the French president for the first time Thursday.

Khaled Khoja, who has headed the main Syrian National Coalition since January, said President Bashar Assad's ouster should not be a pre-condition to enter into a new round of talks with the regime.

Softening the coalition's previous refusal to work with Damascus-tolerated opposition groups, 50-year-old Khoja said he wants "a common ground" with other dissidents, and to "establish a new framework for the Syrian opposition”.

The interview comes less than a week after the exiled coalition met in Paris with the domestic National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change.

For the first time in Syria's war, the two groups agreed on a draft roadmap for future negotiations with Assad's regime.

"We insist on the goal of toppling Assad and the security services... It is not necessary to have these conditions at the beginning of the process, but it is... necessary to end the process with a new regime and a new free Syria," he said.

He also said that while the opposition's main demand is Assad's ouster, it wants to "preserve the Syrian state".

"Unfortunately, the state is being demolished by the regime. Half of the hospitals have been demolished. More than half the schools have been demolished," said Khoja, who has lived in Turkey since the 1980s, after being imprisoned by the regime twice over his political activism.

After meeting Khoja, French President Francois Hollande said Assad is "the main cause of his people's suffering, and for the rise of terrorist groups in Syria".

"He is therefore not a credible interlocutor to fight against Daesh and prepare Syria's future," Hollande said.

Khoja meanwhile told reporters after the meeting that a UN plan to " freeze" the fighting in the main northern Syrian city of Aleppo is "extremely difficult" to implement because "the regime does not respect its commitments".

The National Coalition was established in Doha in 2012. It is recognised by dozens of states and organisations as a legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

It has entered into two failed rounds of negotiations with the regime, and has faced frequent accusations of being disconnected from the situation inside Syria.

Khoja blamed Assad for the rise of militants such as the brutal Daesh group, which is known for its execution videos and mass kidnappings of minority groups in Syria and Iraq.

"The roots of terror," he said, are "Bashar's intelligence services".