Washington Trying to Overthrow Assad Since at Least 2006: Assange
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The United States commenced its attempts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2006, way before the opposition protest in the country in 2011, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.
“We published cables … showing that the US has been trying to overthrow the Syrian government since at least 2006,” Assange told Greek ThePressProject news site on Monday, Sputnik News reported Tuesday.
According to Assange, Washington “was trying to make the Syrian government ‘paranoid’ trying to get it to ‘overreact’ by instilling that fear and paranoia, trying to make it worried about coups, trying to stir up sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiite …, to stop foreign investment in Syria and by secretly funding a variety of NGOs in Syria.
Besides, the United States made Syria look weak by pushing the fact that it was trying to crack down on terrorists as an example of the Syrian government not having full control of the country, Assange added.
Syria has been in a civil war since 2011, with the government fighting multiple opposition factions and militant groups, including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Since the beginning of the war, the United States and some of its allies have been supporting the so-called "moderate" Syrian opposition, while urging Assad to resign.
Assange also said that the mass exodus of people from Syria could be part of a strategic plan to weaken the local government by depopulating the country.
“We have an interesting speculation about the refugee movement. We looked through our cables and so the speculation was this: occasionally opponents of a country would engage in strategic depopulation, which is to decrease the fighting capacity of a government.”
He added that in the case of Syria, those who fled the country were predominantly citizens belonging to the middle class – engineers, managers, bureaucrats – “precisely, the classes that are needed to keep the government functioning.”
“Encouraging [them] to flee Syria by Germany saying they will accept many-many refugees, and by Turkey taking nearly three million refugees thus significantly weakens the Syrian government,” Assange stressed adding that “regardless of whether there is a design behind it the forces engaged in trying to overthrow the Syrian government must be happy with the results.”