Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Horror of Homs...
said Israeli
...
KABOOM!...
s in Syria were targeting the country’s military, and not Iranian forces, in an interview broadcast on Wednesday.
"The Israeli attacks are mainly directed against the Syrian army," Assad told Sky News Arabic in a rare interview.
"It’s an excuse that it’s an Iranian presence," Assad said, according to a translation of his comments by the Walla news site.
Israel’s military has acknowledged conducting hundreds of sorties in Syria against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country, over the last decade.
The Israeli military says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for Iran-backed groups, chief among them Leb
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
’s Hezbollah terrorist organization. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have targeted Syrian air defense systems. Israel does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria.
In the most recent attack, Israeli airstrikes targeted areas near Syria’s capital Damascus early Monday, killing four soldiers, Syria’s state-run SANA media outlet reported.
In the Sky News Arabic interview, his first talk with a foreign media outlet in months, Assad also indicated that his government’s ties to the Hamas terror group and
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
have been strained by over a decade of civil war in Syria.
Hamas was headquartered in Damascus before the war but left Syria in 2012 after condemning the Assad government’s brutal suppression of protests.
Last year, Hamas said it had restored relations with the Syrian government after a visiting delegation met with Assad in Damascus.
But the Syrian president said that it was "too early" to speak of resuming normal ties with the terror group.
"For now, Hamas does not have offices in Damascus," he added in the interview.
Asked about mending ties with
...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really more important..., who has long supported rebel groups in Syria’s north, Assad said: "Why should I meet Erdogan? To drink refreshments?"
Erdogan and Assad had amicable relations in the 2000s but as war broke out, Turkey supported early rebel efforts to topple the Syrian president.
Erdogan reversed course in past years as Damascus clawed back, with Russian and Iranian support, much of the territory it had lost to rebels early in the conflict.
But Assad has long said he will not meet Erdogan unless
"Erdogan’s goal is to legitimize
Syria’s war has killed a half-million people, maimed more than a million, left large parts of the nation destroyed and displaced half the country’s prewar population of 23 million. The fighting has mostly stalemated in the recent years.