admin“We meet today and suffering is overwhelming Syrian land. There is no place for joy while security and stability are absent on the streets of our country,” Assad said in a speech yesterday at the opera house in central Damascus.
“The nation is for all and we all must protect it.”
Assad said his country is being subjected to an unprecedented attack and said the conflict can only be solved through a popular movement.
As in previous speeches, he said his forces were fighting groups of “murderous criminals” and jihadi elements and denied there was an uprising against his family’s decades-long rule.
“We have terrorists who follow the ideology of al-Qaeda. We brothers fight against these people. Most of them are not Syrian . . . We will teach them a lesson,” Assad said.
In his speech, Assad outlined a new peace initiative that includes a national reconciliation conference and a new constitution.
Assad, however, said the initiative can only take roots after regional and Western countries stop funding what he called “militant extremists” fighting to overthrow him.
He struck a defiant tone, saying Syria will not take orders from anyone.
He called on all Syrians to take part in an initiative that would end the nearly 22-month old conflict, but did not give any details of the plan.
Louay Safi, a member of the Syrian National Coalition opposition group, dismissed Assad’s address to the nation as “empty rhetoric”.
“He did not offer to step down, which was a precondition to start any negotiation,” Safi said.
“He has shown that he is a dictator that we cannot negotiate with. I think he has no desire to relinquish power, he wants to crush the opposition and he hopes he can stay over for the next forty years like what his father did.”
Assad’s remarks were his first in public since a Russian television interview in November in which he pledged to stay in Syria and fight to the death if necessary.
The Syrian leader also said that his government has “not found partners” for a political solution to the country’s crisis.
“Just because we have not found a partner, it does not mean we are not interested in a political solution, but that we did not find a partner,” the president said to wild applause in the Dar al-Assad for Culture and Arts in Damascus. He said the conflict was not one between the government and the opposition but between the “nation and its enemies”.
The uprising against Assad has become a civil war that the United Nations says has killed 60 000 people. — Al Jazeera
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