US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, to Retire

Local Editor

US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford is retiring at the end of the month, current and former US officials said on Tuesday.

Ford, a career foreign service officer and a fluent Arabic speaker, was instrumental in negotiating with Syrian opposition groups to join talks in Switzerland last month to try to end Syria's nearly three-year-old civil war.

It was not immediately clear why Ford is retiring. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment on whether Ford planned to retire.

Ford represented the United States at the first round of UN-backed talks that concluded in Geneva on Friday.
The talks ended with no progress toward ending Syria's conflict. Government officials said they would first need to check with Damascus.

Ford had been expected to become US ambassador to Egypt, according to several sources, but Egyptian government officials had objected because they regarded him as too close to the extremist parties in the Middle East.

A former State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was his understanding that the Egyptian government had made clear it did not want Ford to go to Cairo to serve as US ambassador.
Under diplomatic practice known as "agreement," a country typically contacts another country before sending an ambassador to ensure the choice is acceptable. In this case, Ford's candidacy did not even get that far, said the former US official, who has spoken to Egyptian officials about the matter.

"The Egyptians didn't want him. My understanding is that there is an informal query before they ask for ‘agreement.' They didn't ask for ‘agreements' because the informal sounding [from the Egyptians] was ‘We're not interested.'"
The former official said: "My understanding from the Egyptian side is that ... they felt he had helped foment disorder in Syria by supporting insurgents and ...that he was too comfortable with Islamists", adding that he flatly disagreed with that view.

Ford, who also served in Iraq and Algeria and did a stint at the embassy in Cairo, briefly left Syria in October 2011 because of threats to his safety. He left Damascus for good four months later after the United States suspended embassy operations as the security situation in Syria deteriorated.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team