In an interview on Wednesday to Russian media, Assad urged all political and armed factions in Syria to unite in the fight against “terrorist groups”, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), al-Nusra Front and “some others”.
Syria’s president admits army struggling for manpower
“We, the political parties, the government and the armed groups that fought against the government, we must all unite in the name of defeating terrorism,” Assad said.
He added that he would only give up power if the people - and not the United States - asked him to do so.
aljazeera.com/news/2015/09/assad-refuses-resign-terrorism-defeated-150916121911848.htmlAssad said the US, which has been leading a coalition that is carrying out airstrikes on ISIL in Syria and Iraq, refuses to work and coordinate with his government.
[W]e saw that the war [in Iraq would] turn Iraq into a sectarian country, into a society divided against itself. To the West of Syria there is another sectarian country, Lebanon. We are in the middle. We knew well that we will be affected. Consequently, the beginning of the Syrian crisis, or what happened in the beginning, was the natural result of that war and the sectarian situation in Iraq, part of which moved to Syria, and it was easy for them to incite some Syrian groups on sectarian grounds.
The second point which might be less crucial is that when the West adopted terrorism officially in Afghanistan in the early 1980s and called terrorists at that time “freedom fighters,” and then in 2006 when the Islamic State appeared in Iraq under American sponsorship and they didn’t fight it.
sana.sy/en/?p=54857All these things together created the conditions for the unrest with the Western support and Gulf money, particularly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and with Turkish logistic support, particularly that [Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip] Erdogan belongs intellectually to the Muslim Brotherhood. Consequently, he believes that if the situation changed in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, it means the creation of a new sultanate, this time not an Ottoman sultanate, but a sultanate for the Brotherhood extending from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and ruled by Erdogan.
Isn’t that kind of like the burger joint cook saying I won’t stop frying stuff until your cholesterol comes down to normal?God bless President Bashar al Assad, perhaps one of the few people who is sincerely interested in combating terrorism as he does not support terrorism when it is geopolitically convenient.
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sana.sy/en/?p=54857