BEIRUT: President Bashar Al Assad is likely to run for re-election next year and win, with Syria remaining in military and political deadlock until then, said the deputy leader of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah group.
Sheikh Naim Qassem, who predicted a year ago that Assad would not be dislodged from power, said the Syrian leader would win a vote because his supporters understood that their communities’ very existence depended on him.
“I believe that in a year’s time he will stand for the presidency. It will be the people’s choice, and I believe the people will choose him,” said the bearded, turban-wearing Shia cleric, speaking carefully and deliberately.
“The crisis in Syria is prolonged, and the West and the international community have been surprised by the degree of steadfastness and popularity of the regime.”
Citing rifts among Assad’s foes inside and outside Syria, as well as disagreements among world powers over Assad’s future, Qassem said any talk of political solutions was futile for now. “It will take at least three or four months” for any such solution, he said in a meeting with Reuters editors. “Maybe things will continue until 2014 and the presidential election.”
The two-year-old revolt against Assad is the bloodiest and most protracted of the Arab uprisings. At least 70,000 people have been killed and the violence has stoked tensions across the Middle East between the two main branches of Islam. Iran and Hezbollah have supported Assad, whose Alawite sect derives from Shias. The mainly Sunni rebels are backed by Sunni powers Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
Some Western leaders have long predicted Assad’s imminent demise, but Qassem said he was likely to be re-elected in 2014. Wearing brown robes and a white turban, he spoke in a windowless office in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold.
Journalists were driven to the undisclosed venue in a car with blacked-out windows, a security precaution in violence-prone Lebanon. Three Hezbollah leaders have been assassinated in the past two decades; the group blames Israel for the killings.
Hezbollah, the most accomplished military force in Lebanon, fought Israel to a standstill in a 2006 war and, with its mainly Shia and Christian allies, now holds a majority of cabinet seats in Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government. Mikati has tried to insulate his country from the fighting in Syria but Lebanese Shias and Sunnis have both been drawn into the fighting. Hezbollah denies accusations that it has sent its forces into Syria to fight alongside Assad’s troops.
Despite significant and sustained rebel gains, Qassem said the Syrian authorities had scored a string of military successes since insurgents launched attacks in Damascus a few months ago.
“The regime has started winning clearly, point by point,” he said. “And the tensions among the countries supporting the armed (rebel) groups have become clearer.”
Assad’s forces still control central Damascus and large parts of the cities of Homs, Hama and Aleppo to the north. But they have lost swathes of territory in the rural north and most of the eastern towns and cities along the Euphrates River.
In such areas, the Syrian military relies heavily on missiles, artillery and air strikes to pin back rebel advances.
Qassem said Syria only had one viable option: “Either they reach a political solution, in agreement with President Assad... or there can be no alternative regime in Syria,” he said.
Asked whether Syria might fall apart, he replied: “Everything is possible.” Syria’s population includes Christians, Shias, Alawites, Druze and Ismailis as well as majority Sunnis who include mystical Sufis and secularists as well as pious conservatives.Reuters
