Former chief of the UK defense staff calls on the government to abandon its “contradictory war aims” in Syria.

Gen David Richards said British Prime Minister David Cameron should accept that President Bashar Assad must remain in power to allow his army to take the lead in defeating ISIL militants in Syria.

He also called for Britain and other allied nations to broker a deal with Russia that would pave the way for Assad’s forces to lead the charge against ISIL on the ground.

“At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims. We want to deal with Isis but we also want to get rid of Assad at the same time. I personally don’t think that’s plausible. Any general will tell you you need to have unity of purpose and clear aims in a war. That muddies those aims,” Richards said. 

The statements come as Cameron is preparing the ground for a Commons vote on extending airstrikes against Daesh from Iraq to Syria.

As media reports say, Cameron who had insisted that Assad must be removed from power as a first step to building a new settlement in Syria, has softened his language in recent weeks as he seeks to win Russia’s support for targeting ISIL.

Richards emphasized that Cameron must go further and accept that Assad’s army is the only credible force that could fight ISIL on the ground in Syria.

“The real issue is can you use the one army that’s reasonably competent which is President Assad’s army? In that respect I personally would see a ceasefire being agreed in the way people are now talking, allowing potentially Assad’s army and Hezbollah and their Iranian backers and others to turn their attention on Isis in a sequential operation. After that the politics would kick in and you would have to do something about the residual political structure within Syria,” he said.

Richards said a failure to use Assad’s forces would risk a repeat of the chaos in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion.

“The UK military operations have not been effective so far because the ISIL militants are still there,” senior analyst from Foreign Police in Focus, Ian Williams told Press TV’s UK Desk.

He went on saying that to eradicate the militants in Syria requires an international coalition and the current limited strategies adopted by separate governments would lead to nowhere.