Syria’s dictator compared his brutal suppression of rebels in a bloody civil war to the way cops in California handled riots after the Rodney King verdict.
“What did you do in Los Angeles in the ’90s when you had rebels?” Bashar al-Assad demanded in a Fox News interview that aired Thursday.
“Didn’t you send your army? You did.”
“We are against the violence. But what would you do when the terrorists attack your country and kill the people?”
In the lengthy interview, conducted in part by former Rep. Dennis Kucinich:
Assad claimed some rebels are cannibals. “You cannot leave the terrorists free, killing people, assassinating the people, beheading the people and eating their hearts,” he said.
He put the cost of destroying his chemical weapons at $1 billion and said it would take at least a year.
“I think it’s a very complicated operation, technically. And it needs a lot of money, about a billion,” he said. “So it depends. You have to ask the experts what they mean by quickly. It has a certain schedule. It needs a year, or maybe a little bit more.”
Assad insisted “80 to 90 percent” of his foes are al Qaeda fanatics.
What civil war? he asked. “What we have is not civil war. What we have is war. It’s a new kind of war,” he said, alleging that Islamist guerrillas from more than 80 countries had joined the fight.
Assad’s deputy prime minister admitted Thursday that the regime cannot win the war, and that the fighting has hit a stalemate.
“Neither the armed opposition nor the regime is capable of defeating the other side,” Qadri Jamil told Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Secretary of State John Kerry said it is essential that the UN Security Council hammer out a binding resolution by next week to endorse the Russia-US deal for eradicating Assad’s stockpile of poison gas.
“It is vital for the international community to stand up and speak out in the strongest possible terms about the importance of enforceable action to rid the world of Syria’s chemical weapons,” Kerry told reporters.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin said there is no onus on him to make sure his ally Assad complies with the Russia-US deal.
“When I hear this — and this isn’t the first time I hear it — that now I bear special responsibility, we all bear special responsibility, and it’s distributed evenly among us,” he said.