(UTV|COLOMBO) – Saudi Arabia is holding talks with the United States about sending troops into Syria as part of a wider international coalition, the kingdom’s foreign minister has said.
In his comments on Tuesday, Adel al-Jubeir said the deployment offer was “not new”, adding that Riyadh had previously proposed the idea to former US President Barack Obama, the Al Jazeera reported.
“We are in discussion with the US, and have been since the beginning of the Syrian crisis about sending forces into Syria,” al-Jubeir told reporters in Riyadh during a press conference alongside Antonio Guterres, the UN chief.
“We made a proposal to the [previous] Obama administration that if the US were to send forces … then Saud Arabia would consider along with other countries sending forces as part of this contingent.”
The kingdom announced its readiness to deploy ground troops in 2016 to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in Syria.
While Saudi’s air force partook in the aerial campaign aimed at defeating ISIL from the very beginning in 2014, the Gulf kingdom stopped short of a full ground troop deployment.
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