Bashar al-Assad: Cause of Syrian Civil War Is ISIS & Western Propaganda, Intervention

On the cause of the Syrian civil war

The Syrian president said it might come as a surprise if he mentioned the “crucial juncture” in what happened in Syria, saying it is “something that many people wouldn’t even think of.”
“It was the Iraq war in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. We were strongly opposed to that invasion, because we knew that things were moving in the direction of dividing societies and creating unrest. And we are Iraq’s neighbors. At that time, we saw that the war would turn Iraq into a sectarian country; into a society divided against itself. To the west of Syria there is another sectarian country – Lebanon. We are in the middle. We knew well that we would be affected. Consequently, the beginning of the Syrian crisis, or what happened in the beginning, was the natural result of that war and the sectarian situation in Iraq, part of which moved to Syria, and it was easy for them to incite some Syrian groups on sectarian grounds.”
He went on to mention that the West “officially” adopted terrorism in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, calling the terrorists“freedom fighters,” and that it didn’t fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) when it appeared in Iraq under American sponsorship in 2006.
“All these things together created the conditions for the unrest with Western support and Gulf money, particularly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and with Turkish logistic support, particularly since President Erdogan belongs intellectually to the Muslim Brotherhood. Consequently, he believes that, if the situation changed in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, it means the creation of a new sultanate; not an Ottoman sultanate this time, but a sultanate for the Brotherhood extending from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and ruled by Erdogan.”
“All these factors together brought things to what we have today. Once again, I say that there were mistakes, and mistakes always create gaps and weak points, but they are not sufficient to cause that alone, and they do not justify what happened. And if these gaps and weak points are the cause, why didn’t they lead to revolutions in the Gulf States – particularly in Saudi Arabia which doesn’t know anything about democracy? The answer is self-evident, I believe.”
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