Armenia is pressing ahead with plans to deploy military doctors and demining experts in Syria, Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan said on Monday.
Tonoyan told reporters that the Armenian military and other relevant parties are now completing “memorandum-related procedures” required for such a deployment.
“It could be done very quickly,” he said in comments cited by the Armenpress news agency. “It could happen before the end of this year or early next year.”
“The group is fully prepared, it can leave [for Syria] immediately after that process is complete,” he added.
Yerevan’s plans to launch a “humanitarian mission” in Syria were first announced by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian following his September 8 talks in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tonoyan clarified afterwards that the Armenian contingent will include about 100 medics, sappers and other military personnel tasked with protecting them.
According to one of Tonoyan’s deputies, Gabriel Balayan, they will be primarily helping civilians in the war-ravaged city of Aleppo. Balayan told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on September 11 that the deployment will be carried out “at the request of the Syrian government.”
John Bolton, U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, discussed the issue with Pashinian and Tonoyan when he visited Yerevan on October 25.
“The prime minister said this was not going to be military assistance, it would be purely humanitarian,” Bolton said after the talks. “I think that’s important. It would be a mistake for anybody else to get involved militarily in the Syrian conflict at the moment.”
Russia has been trying to legitimize its strong military presence in Syria, criticized by the West, by getting other countries to also deploy troops there. A top Russian military official said in August 2017 Armenia and Serbia are ready to join a multinational “coalition” which Moscow hoped would help its soldiers clear landmines.
The former Armenian government seemed reluctant to commit troops for such a mission. Speaking at the UN General Assembly in September 2017, then President Serzh Sarkisian said Armenian deployment in Syria requires a UN mandate.
An estimated 80,000 ethnic Armenians lived in Syria and Aleppo in particular before the outbreak of the bloody civil war there in 2011. Most of them have since fled the country. Thousands of Syrian Armenians have taken refuge in Armenia.
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