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Beirut — Syria’s President Bashar Assad claimed in an interview published yesterday that his opponents have “used up all their tools” and failed to overthrow his regime. The remarks came as Western-backed Syrian opposition figures gathered in Turkey for talks on electing a new leadership.
In comments to the state-run Al-Thawra newspaper, Assad rejected the idea that what has been happening in Syria since more than two years is a revolution. Instead, he insisted it is a conspiracy by Western and some Arab states to destabilise his country.
In the same interview, Assad praised this week’s massive protests by Egyptians against their Islamists leader and said the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi meant the end of “political Islam”.
In Syria, more than 93 000 people have been killed since the crisis erupted in March 2011. The conflict began as peaceful protests against Assad’s rule, then turned into civil war after some opposition supporters took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown on dissent. Millions of Syrians have been forced to flee their homes.
Throughout the crisis, Assad has insisted that his government is not faced with a popular rebellion, but a Western-backed conspiracy against Syria, accusing the rebels fighting to topple his regime of being terrorists, Islamic extremists and mercenaries of the oil-rich Arab Gulf states that are allies of the United States.
“The countries that conspire against Syria have used up all their tools and they have nothing left except direct [military] intervention,” Assad said in the interview, adding that such an intervention would not happen.
The comments coincided with a meeting of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition in Istanbul in the second attempt in as many months by Assad’s opponents to unify their ranks. — AFP
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