I'm not a puppet. I wasn't made by the west to go to the west or any other country. I'm Syrian. I'm made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in… - Bashar al-Assad

You are mixing between the protesters and the killings, it's different, now we are having terrorists in many places...killing, not only now, from the very beginning, now it's recognized by the media that's the difference, that from the very first few weeks we had those terrorists they are getting more and more, more aggressive, they have been killing. we have 1100 soldiers and policemen killed, who killed them? "peaceful demonstrators"? this is not logical, this is unpalatable...

Since the beginning of this crisis, we have the same motto "Assad must go" many times from nearly every Western officials in different level whether leader or foreign minister and other officials...we never cared about it...we never, so you cannot talk about this threat, this is an interference in our internal issues; we're not going to respond to, as long as i have the support of Syrian people, I don't care about whether...including the President of United States himself, anyone, so it's same for us, that's why...say Clinton and Trump and what Obama said, for me nothing, we don't put it on our political map; we don't waste our time with those rhetorics or even 'demands'

It is an integrated chain of events: from the occupation of Palestine, to the invasion of Iraq and trying to divide it now and the division of the Sudan all planned by Israel and the West and always executed by the states of tyranny and backwardness in our Arab world. Was it not Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Faisal [Ibn Saud] who conceded to Britain that he does not object to giving Palestine to the ‘poor’ Jews in 1915? Did those states not incite the 1967 war, whose price we are still paying today, in order to get rid of the Abul Naser ‘phenomenon’? Did those states not support Iran under the Shah, only to stand against it when it decided to support the Palestinian people and turn the Israeli embassy into a Palestinian embassy after the revolution? Those are the countries which made the ‘King Fahd Peace Initiative’ in 1981 and threatened the Palestinians with rivers of blood if they don’t accept it. When the Palestinian factions rejected it, and in less than a year, there was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the ejection of the PLO from Lebanon, not out of concern for Lebanon, but for Israel. Those same states surprised us in 2002 with their greatest concession: ‘normalization in return for peace,’which was later modified to become the ‘Arab Peace Initiative’in the Beirut summit. When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, it was those same countries that encouraged Israel and the West not to accept a cease-fire until the Lebanese resistance was destroyed, describing them as ‘adventurous.’ Because these satellite countries succeeded in their tasks, they were charged with funding chaos under the name of the ‘Arab spring,’ and with leading the Arab League after other Arab countries abandoned their roles. The Arab League itself was reduced to summoning NATO and imposing a siege on the Arab states that refused to comply. All of these events constitute a strongly linked chain aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause; all the money spent by those countries since their creation has been for this purpose. And here they are today playing the same role: in Gaza through Israeli terrorism, and in Syria through terrorism belonging to 83 nationalities. The methods may differ but their objective is the same.