The Obama administration, buoyed by a rare measure of good news from Syria, now faces increasing pressure to prove it is serious about pushing Bashar Assad out of power.
A cease-fire has held for more than a month, and humanitarian aid is reaching Syrian areas long under siege, developments that a senior U.S. official said have “pleasantly surprised” the administration. But despite an ongoing peace process, little progress has been made on a political settlement among the parties involved.

U.S.-backed Syrian opposition leaders want President Barack Obama to push harder for an agreement that bids farewell to Assad, the Syrian dictator they blame for the past five years of bloodshed. Some worry that if a deal on a political transition isn’t reached soon, the U.S. presidential election could distract the administration and sap its resolve.
“We have a window of opportunity from now until June,” predicted Hadi al-Bahra, a Syrian opposition leader.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said  U.S. wants a political transition and Assad’s future to be resolved as soon as possible. He made sure to reiterate that Assad’s rule has been a major recruitment tool for ISIS.
“There’s been no change on our part on what the future for Assad and Syria need to be,” Kirby added. “We continue to believe that he has lost legitimacy to govern, that what the Syrian people need is a government away from him and one that’s toward institutions that are representative of them and responsive to their needs.”
Staffan De Mistura, the U.N. envoy overseeing the Syrian peace process, has set April 9 as a target for the next round of talks. The most recent round, which involved proximity talks, not face-to-face sessions, ended Thursday after 10 days, and it was considered successful mainly because it didn’t collapse.
De Mistura’s office released a document listing 12 points of common ground he found between the opposition and the Syrian government that he hopes future talks can build on. There’s no mention of Assad.
Some analysts saw the Russian decision as a signal to Assad to get serious about peace talks and not count on Moscow to help him reconquer the whole country, where fighting since 2011 has killed more than 250,000 people.
Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry met with top officials in Moscow and said that the U.S. and Russia had agreed to “accelerate the effort to try to move the political process forward.” He also told CBS news in an interview afterward that Russia is not “wedded” to Assad.
“If I am Bashar Assad, I am not reassured by the talk I hear coming out of Moscow,” the senior Obama administration official told POLITICO. “It’s a pretty clear signal that the Russians are coming on board.”
Syrian opposition leaders, however, remain distrustful of Obama, whom they’ve long considered too slow to react to their needs.

Source: Politico, March 29