Bashar Al Assad said in an
interview published yesterday
he expected his country’s conflict
to be long and difficult but
vowed to defeat the insurgents
battling to oust him and said he
would not be driven from power.
Assad told the French magazine
Paris Match nobody could predict
when the war with Islamic State
militants and other foes would
end but said they had failed to win
over the Syrian people, allowing
his army to make advances.
Underscoring the challenge
facing Assad, a monitoring group
said at least 19 Syrian soldiers
and militia men were killed when
Islamic State militants attacked
the Deir Al Zor airbase, one of the
army’s few remaining strongholds
in eastern Syria.
“The Syrian army cannot be
everywhere at once. Where it is
not present, terrorists take the
opportunity to cross borders and
infiltrate in one area or another,”
Assad said.
“It is not about a war between
two armies ...We are dealing with
terrorist groups that infiltrate a
town or village. So this war will
be long and difficult,” he added.
The text was also carried by
Syrian state media yesterday.
In extracts of the Paris
Match interview published on
Wednesday, Assad also branded
US-led air strikes in Syria since
September as an “illegal intervention”
that had made no difference
in the fight against Islamic State.
Asked whether he saw his own
departure from power as the solution,
he said: “The state is like a
ship: the captain does not escape
in the storm. He does not quit the
deck. If passengers need to leave,
then he is the last to go.”
The Britain-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights
said Islamic State had shelled the
Deir Al Zor airbase on Wednesday
along with other areas still under
government control.
Syrian state news said government
forces had inflicted heavy
losses on the Islamic State fighters
in Deir Al Zor city.
Islamic State, which has seized
swathes of territory in both Syria
and Iraq this year, has been
steadily consolidating its grip over
Syria’s oil-producing province of
Deir Al Zor and now controls all
but a few pockets.
Assad disputed a United
Nations estimate that Syria’s
conflict had killed nearly 200,000
people since it erupted in 2011,
saying figures in the media had
been exaggerated.
He also rejected a suggestion
that Syria had allowed Islamic
State to flourish earlier in the
war to wipe out other insurgents
and accused the United States of
creating conditions for the emergence
of the group through its
occupation of Iraq.
France’s Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius dismissed Assad’s
comments in his interview as
“absurd”, telling France 2 TV:
“How can you imagine that somebody
who caused 200,000 deaths
can stay permanently at the head
of his country?” REUTERS
