Paris: President Bashar Al-Assad on Thursday said Raqqa is not a priority target for his forces, saying his goal is to retake “every inch” of Syrian territory.
“Raqqa is a symbol,” Al Assad said in an interview with French media, while asserting that terrorist attacks carried out in France were “not necessarily prepared” in Daesh stronghold in Syria.
“You have Daesh close to Damascus, you have them everywhere,” Assad said.
“Everywhere is a priority depending on the development of the battle,” he said, as a new round of peace talks was set to kick off in the Kazakh capital Astana.
“They are in Palmyra now and in the eastern part of Syria,” he said in the interview in Damascus with Europe 1 radio and the TF1 and LCI television channels.
“For us it is all the same, Raqqa, Palmyra, Idlib, it’s all the same.”
The Syrian leader said it was the “duty of any government” to regain control of “every inch” of its territory.
After a string of major losses in both Iraq and Syria, the terrorists’ two main strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa are both under attack from forces backed by a US-led coalition.
After a massive, four-month campaign, Iraqi forces are tightening the noose on Mosul, while in Syria, an Arab-Kurd alliance, the Syrian Democratic Forces, has begun advancing on Raqqa.
Also in the interview, Assad categorically denied that his government practises torture and reiterated his rejection of recent allegations by Amnesty International of executions and atrocities perpetrated at a prison near Damascus.
Assad said Amnesty’s “childish report” contained “not a single fact (or) evidence” to support allegations that some 13,000 people were hanged at the Saydnaya prison between 2011 and 2015.
“They said they interviewed few witnesses, who are opposition and defected. So it’s biased,” the Syrian president said.
Regarding torture, he said, “We don’t do this, it’s not our policy,” adding: “Torture for what? ... For sadism? ... to get information? We have all the information.”
He argued: “If we commit such atrocities it’s going to play into the hands of the terrorists, they’re going to win. It’s about winning the hearts of the Syrian people, if we commit such atrocities ... we wouldn’t have (popular) support (through) six years” of war.
Concerning international negotiations to end the conflict that has claimed more than 300,000 lives, Assad said Western countries had “lost their chance of achieving anything in Geneva twice.”
While Turkey, Russia and Iran take the lead in the talks in Astana, the West has become “passive”, he said, denouncing the coalition for supporting “those groups that represented the terrorists against the government.
“They did not want to achieve peace in Syria.”
Russia and Iran have helped turn the tables on the ground with their military backing for Assad, while Turkey has supported rebels fighting to oust the strongman.
A new round of the Astana talks was set to kick off on Thursday after a one-day delay for “technical reasons”.
The talks — pushed by key Assad supporter Moscow — re viewed as a warm-up for UN-led negotiations that are due to begin in Geneva on February 23.
The meeting in Geneva, the fifth time negotiators have gone to Switzerland, has been pushed back twice already, in part to give the opposition more time to form a unified delegation.
Al Assad also lashed out at his French counterpart, accusing Francois Hollande of sponsoring terror in Syria and encouraging Western nations to reset their relations with his pariah government, after six years of civil war.
In the interview, Assad said the French president’s policy is tantamount to “supporting terrorists” in Syria, adding that he would prefer someone who is “not a warmonger” to be the next French president.
Assad’s government has labelled all armed opposition to his rule — including the Western-backed rebels _ as “terrorists.”
French voters are going to the polls to elect a new president on April 23.
Outgoing Hollande maintained former President Nikolas Sarkozy’s position to support Syria’s 2011 uprising against the Assad family rule. The revolt descended into all-out civil war, sparked by the government’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations.
Hollande pushed hard for an international intervention in 2013, after more than 1,000 people were killed in a sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb. Several Western nations and human rights groups subsequently accused Assad’s government of carrying out the attack.
Hollande argued that Assad’s unchecked brutality fostered terror in the region.
France subsequently suffered from a number of attacks claimed by Daesh, including the horrific multi-pronged Paris attack in November 2015 that killed over 100 people.
The intervention ultimately failed to materialise, with US President Barack Obama securing a guarantee from Assad’s sponsor Russia that Damascus would give up its chemical weapons stockpiles.
In the interview, which aired on Thursday, Assad took particular issue with Hollande’s ardour for a military intervention in Syria.
“Hollande himself said it was a mistake not to launch a war in 2013,” Assad said.
The interview comes on the heels of Assad’s remarks last week to Yahoo News, in which the Syrian president said he would welcome US troops on the ground in Syria, to join the battle against “terrorists” — as long as it is in cooperation with his government and respects his country’s sovereignty.
Syria’s six-year civil war has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced half the country’s population. The country is shattered and the chaos has enabled the rise of the Islamic State group, which has managed to seize a substantial chunk of Syrian territory.
