Al Assad ‘confident’ of Russian support

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said he is confident he has the continuing support of key allies Iran and Russian Federation.

A 27-year-old Afghan named Mohammed told AFP he joined the fight in Syria to protect the golden-domed Sayyeda Zainab, a prominent Shi’ite shrine located in a Damascus suburb. The Syrian state requested the assistance of Hezbollah.

“The global community … can not enable Iran to gain respectability and political legitimacy from the JCPOA, which in parallel it continues to actively and directly perpetrate terror throughout the region”, it said.

The U.S. has welcomed initiatives by Russian Federation, an ally of Assad’s, and the U.N.to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis although insisting that any transfer of power must be within the so-called Geneva framework, which calls for the transfer of power to a transitional governing body.

“They’re principled”, the president stated, whereas “america abandons its allies, abandon its associates”.

He added: “This was never the case with Russia’s policy, neither during the Soviet Union, nor during the time of Russian Federation…”

“We’re on the identical axis, the axis of resistance”, the president added.

According to the estimates back in April, some 3,000 Afghan nationals have been deployed to take part in the ongoing Syria conflict.

But in a video posted online apparently by anti-Assad rebels previous year, a dazed and bloodied Afghan militiaman is seen confessing that he was an illegal immigrant in Iran, where authorities offered him $600 a month to fight in Syria – or face deportation.

Within the interview, Assad reiterated that “preventing terrorism” ought to be the precedence in any peace deal.

The sequence of events validate this point in the sense that we notice that whenever there are some triumphs for the Syrian army against the terrorists, Israel interferes and tries to [top] the balance, tries to make the regime a little bit appear weaker. The fighting gathered pace recently, intensifying on major frontlines, including near Damascus where a government air strike on a market place killed 100 people, and in the southern city of Deraa where the government is battling a new rebel attempt to seize the entire city.

De Mistura stated in a press release that hitting crowded civilian markets is “unacceptable”.