Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday called Bashar al-Assad a terrorist and said it was impossible for Syrian peace efforts to continue with him.
Speaking at a joint news conference in the Tunisian capital Tunis following a closed-door meeting with his Tunisian counterpart Beji Caid Essebsi, Erdogan said: “It is absolutely impossible to move ahead with Assad in Syria. For what? How could we embrace the future with the president of a Syria who killed close to 1 million of its citizens?”
“Assad is definitely a terrorist who has carried out state terrorism,” the Turkish leader added.
Airstrikes by the Assad regime on towns and villages of rural Idlib killed two civilians, one of them a child, and injured many others on Wednesday.
The Syrian opposition stressed that the Assad regime bears full responsibility for the tragedy that has been unfolding in Syria since March 2011, saying that he is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria.
The opposition said that Bashar al-Assad committed war crimes through the use of internationally prohibited weapons, including chemical weapons, the torture of detainees to death, and the starvation of the civilian population through the imposition of brutal sieges on many areas across Syria. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department + Agencies)
