Syria Would Implode, If Bashar Assad Fell: Former UK Ambassador
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The ex-British Ambassador to Damascus said Syria would “implode” if the country’s president, Bashar Assad, were removed from power.
Peter Ford, who was Britain's ambassador to Syria from 2003 to 2006 termed as “straightforward misinformation and propaganda” accusations leveled against Bashar Assad in the Western media.
“Lot of this is straightforward misinformation and propaganda,” Ford said referring to reports in the Western media accusing the Syrian president of “slaughtering civilians”.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-sparked war since March 2011 with various terrorist groups, including Daesh, currently controlling parts of it.
According to a report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.
Ford criticized misleading allegations claiming a heavy-handed crackdown by Syrian government in March 2011 turned “peaceful protests” into an armed conflict.
“Obviously only to a degree the so-called revolution was not peaceful, apart from literally the first five minutes. Very very quickly armed men came on the streets and shot demonstrators to provoke these kind of reactions that we’ve just been discussing,” Ford said in the interview with Press TV.
Elsewhere in his comments, Ford argued Syria would "implode" if militants had succeeded in taking over the country.
"If the Assad government were to fall the regime would implode. There would probably be a lot of infighting, but more directly, the jihadists would pour through the streets. There would be massacres; there would be a blood bath."
