Syria’s Assad Says Pope Francis has ‘Incomplete’ Picture of the War

ROME - In a new interview, Syrian President Bashar al Assad responded publicly to a letter he received from Pope Francis over the summer voicing concern about civilian casualties in the country’s ongoing civil war.

Speaking to Italian journalist Monica Maggioni of the RAI 24 news site, Assad said that when he read the pope’s letter, “I had the impression that maybe the picture in the Vatican is not complete.”

“That’s to be expected, since the mainstream narrative in the West is about this ‘bad government’ killing the ‘good people,’” he said, adding that most media depicts the Syrian Army as exclusively targeting civilians and hospitals, “which is not correct.”

Assad said he penned a response to Francis “explaining to the pope the reality in Syria.”

“We are…the first to be concerned about civilian lives, because you cannot liberate an area while the people are against you. You cannot talk about liberation while the civilians are against you or the society,” he said, adding that the most crucial part of any military operation “is to have the support of the public in that area or in the region in general. That has been clear for the last nine years and that’s against our interests.”

In his letter to Assad, dated July 22, Francis pushed for the restoration of stability in Syria, asking the president to “do everything possible” to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the country’s Idlib province, and to create the conditions for “a safe return of exiles and internally displaced persons.”

I think the full truth is hard to find in Syria, where I think there are no “white hats” at all, just different interests vying for power by military arms, and Assad is no “good guy” but neither is hardly any armed faction against him. I think there is guilt all around when it comes to civilian deaths by either direct means or as intentiobnally neglected collatteral damage.

The biggest guilt in the west is in my view NOT that the west did not go in with guns blazing to remove Assad, but that even before much public recognition of a “Syrian opposition” movement, in fact long before the “Arab Spring”, the west was parters with that “Syrian opposition” in its own intially covert and later overt regime change agenda.

Why? The only seriously well organized groups with the most support on the ground, and either armed or ready to be armed to oppose Assad were the Muslim Fandamentalist groups led by or acting in conert with the Syrian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the west had done what those groups wanted, and ousted Assad as they ousted Khaddafi, those groups would have ascended to a majority of any ruling coalition that followed Assad.

The western powers have to admit that either they totally failed to understand that or that they were willing to accept it. That means they were either willfully neglectful of our own interests, or that they intentionally operated against our interests.

The result - both Iran and Russia have much stronger presence in the eastern Mediterranean than before Syria was destabilized. We went from a security situation with Assad that was stable and contained, to a security situation now made more difficult and complex with greater risks and concerns regarding Iranian and Russian influence and actions.

Regime change against Assad was a joint enterprise with a number of western and Middle East interests, including the U.S. Dim and GOP elites - through three administrations, and it should be marked in history as one of the all time western blunders.

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