Syria President Decries 'War From Abroad'

BEIRUT—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday defended his government's actions against what he called a "war from abroad," offering his most categorical rejection of a domestic protest movement yet and vowing to fight terrorism even if meant more bloodshed.



Mr. Assad's televised speech to Syria's new Parliament was his first public address since January and was the first time he publicly addressed the Houla massacre—the killing of at least 100 people, mostly women and children, in an incident last month—that has terrified Syrians and outraged the international community.

In a much-anticipated speech, embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad blames foreign powers and "terrorists" for the violence that has wracked the country for the last 15 months. Video: Reuters/Photo: AP

"As Syrians, we will always feel shame every time we remember it," Mr. Assad told rows of parliamentarians, suggesting it was the handiwork of foreign-backed extremists. "What happened in Houla," he said, "the truth is, even monsters don't carry out such acts."

Syria's opposition largely slammed the speech, as they did his prior addresses, as out of touch with reality.

Mr. Assad's speech came after a week of mounting international pressure to hold the Syrian government accountable for the Houla killings. Kofi Annan, the special envoy on Syria, voiced frustration Saturday with Syria's defiance of his United Nations-backed peace mission.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday said she pressed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to join international efforts for a transition in Syria that would see Mr. Assad leave power, the Associated Press reported. "We all have to intensify our efforts to achieve a political transition and Russia has to be at the table helping that to occur," Ms. Clinton said she told him.

European Union leaders were expected to discuss Syria with Russian leaders on Sunday evening during a dinner in St. Petersburg, ahead of a bilateral summit on Monday, the first since Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency.

Mr. Putin attended the dinner, along with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

EU Foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who also planned to meet with Mr. Lavrov, said in a statement that she'd spoken to Mr. Annan and they "both agreed that we are currently at a critical point in the Syrian crisis...we need to avoid a catastrophe."

She said "further militarization of the conflict will bring enormous suffering to Syria and risks having a dramatic impact on the region."

Echoing that sentiment, in neighboring Lebanon, where Syria's conflict continued to reverbate in clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian government groups, 15 people were killed in fighting in the northern city of Tripoli between Saturday and Sunday, said local news reports. Lebanese troops and security forces deployed in parts of the city to help restore calm on Sunday.

During Mr. Assad's hourlong speech to Parliament, the lawmakers applauded just twice, reflecting a more somber setting than during prior speeches, when applause was frequent.

He appeared defiant, saying Syria faced a colonialist conspiracy and would inflict "a humiliating defeat on its enemies."

He likened the Houla massacre to other violent incidents that have ravaged other parts of the country, and appeared to mock witness accounts blaming progovernment militias as just the latest refrain from those who have long blamed the government for the conflict.

"We must know first that we don't face a political problem," he said, focusing on the need to fight terrorism "to heal the nation."

Mr. Assad dismissed prior suggestions from Syrian officials that the Houla killings were the work of government opponents who sought to derail Mr. Annan's U.N.-backed peace plan by implicating the government.

Instead, he tried to marginalize the opposition entirely, painting an alarming picture of foreign-backed terrorism on the rise in Syria that is unrelated to the uprising.

He told Syrians to prepare for even more acts of terrorism, promising to pursue an uncompromising approach to national security. "The cost will be high—it already has been high," the 46-year-old leader told Parliament. "But we must be prepared to pay it…We all hate bloodshed, but we are dealing with reality."

Mr. Assad, a physician, spoke in chilling medical terms about the alleged terrorists he said have pushed his country into war. "When a surgeon in an operating room ... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood?" Mr. Assad asked, the AP reported. "Or do we thank him for saving the patient?" Mr. Assad's language has grown increasingly defiant in his past few public speeches. In January, he promised to crush terrorists with an "iron fist"—a pledge that was followed by the military unleashing its harshest crackdown on the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs in February. The campaign drove rebel forces and much of the district's residents out.

The crackdown has been punctuated by political overhauls that are unprecedented for Syria but widely characterized by the opposition and Western governments as irrelevant amid the bloodshed. On Sunday, Mr. Assad said a new government would be formed soon that includes the country's "new political realities"—a vague reference to groups outside the ruling Baath Party.

Syria's government hailed parliamentary elections last month, the first to be held under a new constitution, for being pluralistic and drawing in new political parties.

But the vote, which Mr. Assad on Sunday repeatedly hailed as evidence of the power of reforms in Syria, was boycotted by the opposition, and the Baath Party ultimately retained a majority of seats, suggesting little real reform under way.

Sunday's speech is likely to raise fears among the opposition that a new, international push for action against the Assad regime in the wake of the Houla massacre that began May 25 has little chance of coaxing the regime to change its course.

"To hell with Bashar," said Hikmat Najdat Abdelhak, the mayor of Khirbet el-Jouz, a small village near Syria's border with Turkey that was stormed by the Syrian army last June. Mr. Abdelhak and most of the village's 5,000 residents have since fled to Turkey.

"I am watching four of our villages, olive groves, and farmland burn across the border right now," Mr. Abdelhak said by telephone from the Turkish camp where he has lived for nearly a year. "They are burning our farmland, after emptying our villages."

The killings in Houla, on a countryside plain northwest of the city of Homs, appeared to mark a new turn in Syria's violent descent into civil conflict. U.N. monitors in Syria described what looked like summary executions of entire families. Fewer than 20 of at least 108 people found dead were apparently killed in shelling from government tanks, with the rest killed in short-range shootings by people whom many survivors describe as pro-government militias, according to the monitoring mission.

Syria's government on Thursday said that an investigative commission found, in its preliminary results, that 600 to 800 armed men launched a seemingly coordinated attack on government forces. Opposition and rights groups said the government probe was a sham.

At least 10,000 people have been killed, according to U.N. estimates, in an uprising that started with peaceful protests last year and has morphed into an insurgency fighting a government military campaign.

Analysts described Mr. Assad's speech as an appeal to the growing number of Syrians fearful for their day-to-day safety as the violence in their country has grown more gruesome and chaotic.

But in some ways, Mr. Assad's language also appeared to acknowledge—if not solidify—the deep divisions in Syria between government supporters and opponents, which Syrians have been describing as irreconcilable for months.

In the speech, he described himself not as a president for all Syrians—a particular role he had emphasized in previous public appearances as he reached out to the divided nation—but as a president for Syrians who stand "under the constitution and the rule of law." Identifying himself as a president for all Syrians, he said, would equate the "[foreign] agent with the patriotic," and the "martyrs with the torturers."

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