Syria president blames West for France attacks

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says recent terrorist attacks in France were the repercussion of Western support for “terrorism”.

“We need to remind many in the West that we have warned of such incidents since the beginning of the crisis in Syria,” the Syrian president said in an interview with Czech publication Literarni Noviny on Wednesday.

“We told the West that it should not support terrorism and give it political cover because it would all affect your countries and your people. They didn’t listen to us,” he added.

A recent wave of terrorist attacks in France began on January 7, when the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo came under assault by two gunmen. Twelve people were killed in the incident that was followed by other terrorist attacks claiming five more lives.

The terrorist attacks in the French capital, Paris, proved that “what we said was true,” Assad further noted, accusing Western leaders of being “short-sighted”.

He sympathized with the families of the victims of terrorist attacks in Paris, saying people in Syria have been suffering from “this kind of terrorism” for the past four years.

“We are against the killing of innocent people anywhere in the world,” Assad said.

Syria has been grappling with a deadly crisis since March 2011. Western powers and their regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey – are the main supporters of the militants operating inside Syria.

More than 200,000 people have died so far in the conflict in Syria, according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein.