December 10, Pozirk. Alaksandar Łukašenka has expressed regret about the ouster of Bashar Assad in Syria, claiming that he was “not a dictator at all.”
“He treated people as a doctor,” he said today during his trip to Barysaŭ, Minsk region. “He is a doctor by profession. I have known him for a long time. We had good human relations. . . He never killed anyone.”
The statement comes after Syria’s rebel fighters discovered 40 bodies at a hospital morgue that showed signs of torture.
Human rights defenders estimate that more than 30,000 Syrian prisoners were executed or died of torture between 2011 and 2018.
Łukašenka also dismissed the idea that Assad was overthrown by the Syrian people rather than rebel forces. “What people? Poor, destitute. They turned the country . . . completely destroyed it,” he said.
Łukašenka also made a clearly false claim about the West’s role in the Syrian cilivl war. “There is plenty of oil and gas there. They [the West] need to build a gas pipeline through Syria to the Mediterranean. All that was in the interests of the West and the Americans. And they play the main role there,” he claimed.
In fact, in October 2019, US President Donald Trump ordered a withdrawal of American forces from northeast Syria, a decision that effectively ceded control of the area to the Syrian government and Russia.
Łukašenka supported Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, throughout the Syrian civil war, which has been ongoing since 2011. Two days ago, rebels captured Damascus, overthrowing al-Assad. He reportedly fled to Moscow.
