BBC Interview with President Bashar al-Assad

Jeremy Bowen and Bashar al-Assad.

The war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been raging for four years. Although US President Barack Obama said in August 2011that "Assad must go", he is still in power. The BBC interview offers some insights into Assad's thinking. When Obama boastfully announced in 2011 that "the future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way", he must have gotten something wrong. In the interview with Jeremy Bowen al-Assad made it clear that he would not have survived without the support of the Syrian people. 

Assad named also clearly the evil force behind the scene, which created this mess in Syria: Saudi Arabia with its totalitarian Wahhabi ideology. The Saudi regime is the greatest problem for the West. Not Assad but the Saudi regime has to go. If the West doesn't do the job, the Islamic State (IS) will do it. Both Islamic dictatorships share the same ideology. Without the control of Mecca and Medina an Islamic State doesn't make much sense. 

Assad seems convinced that he is fighting terrorism, which is instigated by the West and its Arab client states. He denied flatly that his regime has used barrel bombs. What the interview further shows is a lack of flexibility and a suppleness of mind on Assad's part. It seems as if the US American political class has softened their rhetoric on Assad. Perhaps they are having second thoughts about the chaos they have created in the region. Each country, the US has invaded is immersed in civil war and chaos: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. You name it, you've got it.

It seems as if the West fights fire with gasoline in Syria by holding a protecting hand over Saudi Arabia. How come that the West is so obsessed to overthrow the last secular regime in the region to clear the way for the founding of an Islamic State in the whole of the Middle East, which already today poses a threat to the West?