Syria has rejected Britain’s proposal that Bashar al-Assad could lead a transitional government for up to six months before stepping down, as part of a political solution to the country’s crisis and to end the wave of refugees heading to Europe to escape the war.



“What gives the British foreign secretary the right to decide for Syrians how long their president should stay in power?” Omran al-Zoubi, the Syrian information minister, told the Guardian in an exclusive interview in his Damascus office.

He said Britain was following “irrational and illogical” policies by attacking the only country seriously fighting Isis and other terrorists and urging its leader to step down.

In a sign of intensifying diplomatic activity provoked by the continuing refugee crisis and controversy over the killing of two British Isis members by an RAF drone, Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, on Wednesday said the UK would take a pragmatic approach to a transition in Damascus.

“We are not saying Assad and all his cronies have to go on day one,” Hammond told MPs. In order to get Syria’s allies, Russia and Iran, on board, Britain and other western governments would agree to a transitional period of up to six months in which the president could remain in office, he said. But Assad’s security apparatus would have to be shut down.

The idea of a transitional government is contained in the 2012 Geneva principles for ending the war. But this was the first time a time-period has been mentioned.

The six months suggestion got predictably short shrift from Zoubi, who said: “What if I suggested that [David] Cameron should not stay in power for more than thee days and that Hammond must leave at the end of today? Would it be right to interfere with the will of the British people?”

Assad was re-elected last year, Zoubi noted. Syrian opposition forces and their western supporters dismissed the poll and continue to insist that, as the US has put it, “there is no way possible that a man who has led a brutal response to his own people can regain legitimacy to govern”.

Like all Syrian officials, Zoubi treats any opposition to Assad as Islamist and terrorist, ignoring less visible and often ineffectual democratic and secular elements.

“We will not allow Syria to become an extremist emirate,” he said. “It will not be another Saudi Arabia” describing the kingdom as “the General Motors of terrorism [which] exports it to the rest of the world” and as the perpetrator of the September 11 attacks on the US.

Qatar and other “backward and demented” Gulf states, and Turkey, were all supporting Isis, he said. “Is it credible that a member of Nato is part of the system of terrorism in the region?”

“My message to Britain is that their deeds must match their words,” Zoubi said. “If they are really against terrorism let them act accordingly and genuinely confront Isis. The way to do that is by not ignoring those who are really fighting Isis. I can’t understand Cameron. The behaviour of the British government reflects a mentality that goes back to colonial times. They have to abandon the sanctions that have cost Syrians dearly. Isis and the sanctions are two faces of terrorism.”

Zoubi said that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Turkish AK party had been the inspiration for al-Qaida and its Syrian branch Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as Isis and Islamists like Ahrar al-Sham, fighting Assad’s forces.

Russia and Iran were “real friends” of Syria, he said – in the wake of recent reports that Moscow has been boosting its military assistance to Damascus. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, again confirmed on Thursday that Russia has military personnel in Syria, but said nothing about deployments of additional troops.

Zoubi said Syria was capable of regaining territory lost to it in recent months – whether in Raqqa and Palmyra, held by Isis, or Idlib province held by other groups.

Zoubi added that the burden of dealing with refugees arriving into Europe should be borne by European and American governments because of their policies in the region, from intervention in Libya to the crises in Yemen and Syria – and especially the economic sanctions imposed on it since the uprising began at the height of the Arab spring in 2011.