Quotes About Assad

President Bush was disgusted by the Assad regime's oppression of the Syrian people as well as its support for terrorism, interference in Lebanon, and encouragement of jihadist attacks on Americans in Iraq.

The fate of Syria hangs in the balance, but it is entirely possible that the fall of the Assad regime will result in anarchy and cause Syria to turn into a second Afghanistan, a base for anti-Israel terrorism.

It is in our interest to crush ISIS, terrorist groups like the al-Nusra front and Ahrar ash-Sham, and Iran's puppet Assad.

Here's the problem - under both Obama and Trump, American military forces and assistance have provided just enough support to anti-Assad forces to keep the resistance going, but never enough help to actually dislodge Assad from power.

After Assad's chemical weapons attacks in 2013, I believe that the United States should have followed through on Obama's threats and bombed the Syrian military targets designated by the Pentagon.

Assad has to be removed, and then you have to actually put someone in that is a qualified leader that can start to build some trust in that area.

If the Assad regime in Syria were to fall, the likeliest outcome would be a prolonged and bloody civil war. The last thing the Syrian army would be considering, either, as it battles to keep in power the regime it rules in partnership with, is a foreign war. If the Assad regime survives, on the other hand, it will be business as usual: lots of talk and absolutely no action. If anything, domestic unrest has made Israel policy an even lower priority for Damascus.

I thought the best way to topple Assad was not through airstrikes, but through equipping the moderate rebel elements.

Assad's brutality has nurtured extremism and been its main recruiting sergeant.

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he's a liar.

On Putin's order, Russia intervenes in Syria not to fight terrorists but to abet the war crimes of the Assad regime. Russian bombers deliberately target aid workers and hospitals. They threaten Syrian freedom fighters trained by the U.S. They are allied with our enemies in the Middle East and trying to weaken our friendships there.

We have to do one thing at a time. We can't be fighting ISIS and fighting [Bashar]Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS.

The Assad regime is quite reliant on oil exports.

Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad belongs to the small Alawite sect and is therefore considered a heretic by many Sunnis; al-Assad runs a secular regime, and therefore he is considered by Sunni militants to be an apostate, and he is inflicting a total war on his Sunni population.

I think the Russians have played now for some time the role of providing cover for Bashar al-Assad's behavior. The alternative explanation that the Russians put forth is simply not plausible.

In Syria, if [Bashar al-] Assad had just been a statesman and handed over the reigns in time, Syria would not be heading down the nightmare that it is today.

Iran, the Syrian regime's only regional ally, began dispatching military advisers to bolster Assad. (Syria had been the only country to support Iran during its eight-year-long war with Iraq, a conflict that ended in 1988, in which Saddam Hussein liberally used chemical weapons and Iran lost a million young men.) These intrusions transformed the Syrian revolution into a proxy war, where regional powers fought for influence.

Foreign fighters, known as muhajireen, or migrants, began streaming into town—answering the call to fight Assad, to build a state in God's name, to find some dignity and purpose in the plains of Syria that had been absent in their lives in Europe or Tunisia or Morocco or Jordan. These foreigners became the leading lights of the transformed city.

In government-controlled Syria, the broken land over which Bashar al-Assad presided as nominal victor, there was no sign that the regime would cease the policies of repression and violence that had provoked the original uprising. In July 2018, the government issued death certificates for sixty thousand people who had simply disappeared in government detention.

The Assad regime has lost the consent of the governed, and it is difficult to see how a replacement Alawite regime would be able to regain this consent.

Assad is unquestionably guilty of the most grievous fault and has inflicted horrors upon his people.

A lot of the issue that is happening in Syria is Assad is still there. And after years now, the administration, of saying Assad has to go, the pressure is not being applied to Russia, to Iran - the folks that are propping up Assad - and Assad himself to be able to actually be removed there and to transition to another leader.

Russia and Iran back Assad, but are they fighting Daesh? The answer is 'no.'