Assad tells Syrian army he is sure of victory against rebels

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Thursday he was confident of victory against rebels in a devastating 28-month-old civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and sent nearly two million fleeing abroad.

Insurgents have seized large swathes of territory, but Assad’s forces have staged a counter-offensive in recent weeks, pushing them back from around the capital Damascus and retaking several towns near the border with Lebanon.

“If we were not sure that we were going to win in Syria, we would not have the ability to resist and the ability to continue fighting for more than two years against the enemy,” state news agency SANA quoted Assad as saying.

Assad has framed the revolt against four decades of his family’s rule as a foreign-backed conspiracy fought by Islamist “terrorists.” When pro-democracy protests started in March 2011, a military crackdown eventually led to an armed insurrection.

Addressing officers on the 68th anniversary of the Syrian army’s creation, Assad said soldiers had shown “courage in the face of terrorism … and the fiercest barbaric war in modern history”.

U.N. investigators say Assad’s forces have carried out war crimes including unlawful killing, torture, sexual violence, indiscriminate attack and pillaging in what appears to be a state-directed policy. They say rebels have also committed war crimes, including executions, but on a lesser scale.

The struggle in Syria has become markedly sectarian, broadly pitting majority Sunni Muslim rebels and against Assad’s minority Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Assad has relied on Alawite-led army units and security forces from the start, but has turned increasingly to loyalist militia armed and funded by Damascus to fight the rebels.

He has also received solid support from Shi’ite regional powerhouse Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and longtime ally Russia, while his fragmented foes have received little military aid from their Western backers wary of the growing presence of hardline Islamist rebel groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda.

Reuters

Photo top:  Destruction in the city of Homs. The devastated Homs in 2013 looks like Berlin in 1945