In an extensive interview granted exclusively to the Spanish newspaper El País, Syria’s President Bashar Assad, who is considered a murderous autocrat by the Western world, justified the Russian intervention in the civil war eating away at his nation by explaining that “we definitely need that help for a simple reason: because more than 80 countries supported those terrorists in different ways, some of them directly with money, with logistical support, with armaments, with recruitments.”
“Some other countries supported them,” he said, referring in general to the assorted groups of rebels trying to topple his régime, “politically, in different international forums. Syria is a small country. We could fight, but in the end, there’s unlimited support and recruitment for those terrorists. You definitely need international support.”
Later in the interview, he repeated a theory rampant in Russia: that US air strikes, not Russian, have killed dozens of civilians. “We don’t have any evidence that the Russians attacked any civilian targets. They are very precise in their targets and they always attack, every day, the bases or the targets of the terrorists. Actually, it’s the Americans who did this, who killed many civilians in the northeastern part of Syria, not the Russians. ”
Asked where he sees himself in ten years, the man known as the ‘Butcher of Damascus’ said “If Syria is safe and sound, and I’m the one who saved his country – that’s my job now, that’s my duty.”