Thread by @les_politiques

#Assad: we didn't send people to #Idlib, they wanted to go to Idlib because all these groups have the same incubator and ideas. (around min 5) rt.com/news/428299-as…

#Assad on the #SDF: we share much in common, including profound mistrust of the Americans, we are going to negotiate with the SDF, if no negotiations, we are going to liberate by force, with or without the Americans in the picture (around min 12)

#Assad: #Israel is panicking because it lost its dear ones, #alQaeda/#Nusra. Both targeted our air defenses, Israel & #US inflicted some loss, but thanks to #Russia, the situation is getting better. Recent attacks by the Americans, English and French prove this point.

#Assad:
We do not have chemical weapons.
We do not use chemical weapons agianst our civilians when we want to win these civilians.
Nobody uses chemical weapons when the battle has ended.

#Assad: Ghouta, at the end of the battle, was packed with civilians intermingled with fighters and our army. If you're going to use chemical weapons, you are going to hurt everybody, not a particular group.

#Assad: western journalists who visited Ghouta didn't see evidence of any attack. Locals say there was no CW attack. There was no CW attack in Ghouta, it was a pretext to attack #Syria

#Assad: could there be another attack by the West on #Syria for alleged chemical weapons use? Of course. With no legal basis for these attacks on Syria, this could happen again, and everywhere, not only in Syria.

#Assad on the tripartite western airstrikes on #Syria: the story didn't hold but they had to do something and while they were thinking about more comprehensive strikes, the information we have is that #Russia's response to their threats made them reduce the scale of the strikes.

#Assad: the term 'civil war' to describe what's happening in #Syria is misleading. It was used even by some of our allies, by mistake. This is not a civil war. In the area controlled by the government we kept all the diversity of Syria.

#Assad: The term 'civil war' for #Syria is incorrect. What we had, from the beginning, is mercenaries paid by the West and others to topple the government.

#Assad: if we had civil war in #Syria, we should have been divided by now.

.@MuradGazdiev: how close we were to a direct confrontation between the 5 nuclear powers present in #Syria?
#Assad: we were very close, fortunately it has been avoided, not by the wisdom of the American leadrship, but by the wisdom of #Russia.

#Assad: it is not in the interests of anyone, first of all Syrians, to have a direct confrontation between nuclear powers in #Syria. We need the support of the Russians, but we also need to avoid the foolishness of the Americans in order to stabilize our country.

#Assad: the more we stabilize, the more escalation, the more we reconcile, the more we see attempts to thwart this with buckets of money from outside, but this only increases our determination because we don't have a choice, either you have a country or you don't have a country.

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Main points from #Assad's interv with @MuradGazdiev: Assad is determined to bring peace to Syrians, ready to accept a pax Russiana, doesn't seem too much worried about #Israel, hopeful he can reach agreement with SDF (expect SDF defections), seems in no rush to descend on Idlib.

1/ #Assad's strategy for the end of the war seems to give priority to liberating the South & the North-East.

2/ Once the South & the North-East are pacified, probably through an agreement with Kurds returning to the fold of the Syrian state, there will be return to the initial situation that prevailed before the war with regard to Turkey & the Kurds. #Assad

3/ This doesn't mean that #Turkey and #Syria will be chummy again, but it means that each diad in these relationships will nudge the other diad to some reconciliatory gesture until an equilibrium is reached. Or one does hope so.

4/ What about #Israel? Lately, the axis of Resistance, with #Syria at the centre, seems to be confident. Israel has lost its jihadist proxies in the South and, in the current circumstances, any move by Israel to enter directly the war will be self detrimental.

5/ It is the first time since the start of the war in #Syria that #Assad exudes so much confidence in an interview about the prospects of the end of the war and the future of #Syria.

The #SDF will have to negotiate with the Syrian state. They are a minority occupying 25% of #Syria's territory. Bedouins living in this territory won't accept losing the rights to traditional living given to them by the Syrian state. sahipkiran.org/2014/08/05/kur…

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