Answering Bloomberg question regarding the future of Assad, Aleksandr Lavrentyev, President Vladimir Putin's special representative at international talks on Syria said, “I don’t see why he shouldn’t or wouldn’t run for another presidential term."
“This is entirely up to him,” the Russian official said on Tuesday.
In the meantime, US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert had told reporters in a weekly briefing on Tuesday that the US "believes that the future of Syria will not include Bashar al-Assad.”
US and its regional allies created and supported terrorist groups in Syria to oust the country’s legal government led by Assad. Damascus countered the foreign-sponsored terrorists, in particular Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL), in cooperation with Iran and Russia.
Recapture of the Syrian town of Al-Bukamal from Daesh on November 19 marked an end to the terror group’s self-proclaimed caliphate it had declared in 2014.
Now, with the end of civil war in Syria, the country’s government in cooperation with Iran and Russia is trying to resolve the crisis through political ways with the mediation of UN and Russia-Iran-Turkey troika and prepare the ground for reconstruction of the war-torn country.