Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must step down quickly to stop the country spiraling into civil war, but should be allowed to stay in the country as he is not responsible for the unrest, the incumbent leader’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, said on Thursday.
In an interview with French television, Rifaat al-Assad said months of civil unrest had effectively deprived Syria of leadership and it now risked being torn apart by armed militias and could face a worse upheaval than neighboring Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s and 1980s.
Out of a sense of patriotism, Bashar al-Assad should speed up his departure, he said, but his presence in Syria was not untenable, as blood had been shed on both sides, among supporters and opponents of the government.
Photo: Reuters
“He has to go, but without leaving the country. He isn’t responsible; it’s a historical accumulation of many things and I’d like him to convince himself to step down,” Rifaat al-Assad told LCI television.
Rifaat al-Assad is a former military commander, widely held responsible for crushing an Islamist uprising in 1982 against then president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in which thousands were killed.
Rifaat turned against the government in the 1980s and now lives in exile. Earlier this year, his son and Bashar’s cousin, Ribal, who lives in exile in London, urged the Syrian leader to attempt a rapprochement with opponents to avoid civil war.
On Thursday, Ribal told BBC radio the Syrian government just wanted to cling to power.
He called for the opposition to be united, to include all the country’s different ethnic groups, sects and religions, as part of a process towards a peaceful transition. This could allow his cousin to “get out, if somebody could give him refuge,” he said.
“I have been talking to people in the military and in the military secret service lately in Syria who also are tired and are against what is happening,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Syria, government troops shelled two northern villages overnight after an attack by army defectors on forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, local activists said yesterday, in the first reported use of sustained shelling against the eight-month uprising.
The assault came a day after the Arab League suspended Syria and gave it until the end of the week to comply with an Arab peace plan to end a crackdown on the revolt that has killed more than 3,500 people, by a UN count.
Eight villagers were injured overnight when tank shells and heavy mortars fell for three hours on Tal Minnij and Maarshamsheh and surrounding farmland, the activists said.
It was not possible to confirm the shelling independently. Syria has barred most foreign media since unrest began.
Army defectors earlier had attacked a building housing security forces near army depots in the Wadi al-Deif area on the edge of the town of Maarat al-Numaan, 290km north of Damascus, activists said.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS