WASHINGTON — The United States came “late” to efforts to find a political settlement to the war in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday, as the crisis there deepened with political uncertainty in neighboring Turkey.
Kerry said that an international conference — which he and his Russian counterpart proposed in Moscow nearly a month ago — remained the best resolution for ending the fighting, but his remarks carried the implication that the Obama administration had moved too slowly in its first term to seek a negotiated solution to a conflict that erupted more than two years ago and turned into a war.
“This is a very difficult process, which we come to late,” Kerry said after meeting at the State Department with Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski.
“We are trying to prevent the sectarian violence from dragging Syria down into a complete and total implosion where it has broken up into enclaves, and the institutions of the state have been destroyed, with God knows how many additional refugees and how many innocent people killed,” Kerry said.
His remarks underscored the ferment in the region, including the wave of protests in Turkey against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Although the protests began over a park project and remained focused on Erdogan’s leadership, the Obama administration sounded alarmed by the prospect that they could distract Turkey’s government from its prominent support in managing the crisis in Syria and elsewhere in the region.
Kerry noted that Erdogan had recently visited Washington and that he had worked “very closely” with Turkey’s foreign minister “on efforts with respect to the Middle East.”
“We urge all people involved, those demonstrating and expressing their freedom of expression, and those of the government, to avoid any provocations of violence,” said Kerry, who has traveled three times to Turkey as secretary.
Kerry and the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, expressed concerns about the use of force against the protesters.
There were new signs that the Syria war threatened to destabilize another neighbor, Lebanon. On Sunday, rebel Syrian fighters and members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fought gun battles near the border with Syria, leaving at least a dozen fighters dead in some of the worst violence to spill over the border.
On Monday unidentified gunmen tried to assassinate Sheik Maher Hammoud, a Sunni religious cleric from the city of Sidon who has been a supporter of Hezbollah. As Hammoud and three bodyguards were walking to the mosque for dawn prayers, an automobile pulled up behind them and men inside opened fire, according to one of the bodyguards. No one was injured, the bodyguard said.
In a separate development, doctors in the Syrian town of Qusair said they are treating hundreds of wounded in battle-damaged homes and underground shop storerooms, short on antibiotics and anesthesia and using unsterilized cloth for bandages and hand pumps instead of oxygen canisters.
Amid relentless shelling, there are some 1,000 wounded, at least 300 of them seriously and in need of immediate evacuation, one doctor coordinating medical efforts in the town said Monday. But so far, the forces of President Bashar Assad’s regime backed by fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group are barring any exit as they try to crush rebels and retake the town.
Qusair, near the Lebanese border, has become the latest urban battleground in the grueling fight between Assad’s military and the rebels trying to overthrow his regime.
The town is on supply routes that are vital for both sides.
Qusair, an agricultural community, is now a ghost town, said Rifaei Tammas, an activist. The town’s homes, most of them one or two stories, have been damaged or leveled by the fighting.
In Israel, the defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said that Assad controlled only 40 percent of the territory of Syria and that the rebels fighting the Syrian government now held four neighborhoods of Damascus, the Syrian capital.