West can’t stand independent Syria

Syria’s president says Western countries started supporting anti-Damascus militants because they could not bear to see the Arab country leading an independent existence.

Bashar al-Assad made the remarks in a meeting with a visiting delegation of Greek parliamentarians in the Syrian capital on Tuesday, the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported.

“The problem of many Western states’ leaders with Syria is that it has an independent decision, and so they supported terrorists to weaken it and make it a satellite state,” Assad said.

He said the US-led campaign in Syria, which purports to be targeting Daesh, has boomeranged in the face of the West for sparing the Takfiri terrorist group and striking the Syrian people instead.

Earlier in the month, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said French warplanes had targeted the village of Tukhan al-Kubra on the outskirts of the northern city of Manbij, killing 120 civilians. The fatalities came a day after a US airstrike killed 20 civilians in Manbij, it said. Both airstrikes were conducted under the US-led coalition command.

“There are many lessons that the region and the world can learn from the terrorist war that targets the Syrian people,” the Syrian head of state said.

“The proof of that is the wave of terrorism that struck in several states in Europe and the world recently,” Assad said, referring to several attacks across the US and Europe over the past two years that have been claimed by Daesh.

The US-led coalition has been bombarding Syria since September 2014 without authorization from Damascus or the United Nations. Analysts say the US-led campaign has failed to dislodge the terrorists, who have seized parts of land in Iraq and Syria and are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.