President Assad Hails Iran, Russia’s Role in Fighting Terrorism
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Iran and Russia’s unwavering support for Damascus has played a key role in the country’s “steadfastness” in its battle against terrorism.
“The Russian role is very important. It has had a significant impact on both the military and political arena in Syria… What is definite is that the Russian support to the Syrian people and government from the very beginning, along with the strong and staunch support of Iran, has played a very important part in the steadfastness of the Syrian state in the fight against terrorism,” Assad told the British Sunday Times newspaper, Sputnik reported on Sunday.
The Syrian president also said that the US-led coalition has never been serious in its so-called fight against terrorism and stressed that since the coalition launched airstrikes against militant targets in Syria in September 2014, Daesh, al-Nusra Front and “other like-minded organizations or groups were expanding freely.”
Elsewhere in his remarks, Assad accused Paris and Berlin of supporting terrorist groups in Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in the Arab country in early 2011, saying, “Britain and France helped in the rise of ISIS (Daesh) and al-Nusra in this region.”
He further said airstrikes launched by the UK and France against purported positions of the Daesh Takfiri terrorists in the Arab country will be futile as the two states lack the will as well as the vision on how to defeat terrorism.
Syria has been entangled in civil war since March 2011. The ISIL Takfiri terrorist group controls parts of the Arab country, mostly in the east.
Meanwhile, Russia’s aerial support for the Syrian forces has given fresh impetus to the fight against the foreign-backed terrorists.
Since late September, Russia has been carrying out bombings against the ISIL terrorists in Syria, after Russia’s parliament granted President Putin authorization to deploy the country’s air force abroad.
In the past four and a half years, more than 250,000 people have died in Syria -overwhelmingly civilians- and around 4 million Syrian people are now refugees in other countries. Around 8 million others have been displaced internally.