Syrian President Bashar al-Assad won over 95.1% of the votes in government-controlled places and was sworn in in this war-torn country. This is his fourth seven-year term.
The May 26 election was described as illegal and false by Assad’s opponents and Western countries.
On Saturday, the inauguration ceremony was held at the Presidential Palace in Damascus. More than 600 people including clergy, parliament members, politicians and military officers attended.
In his inauguration speech, 55-year-old Assad said that the election “proved the power of the people’s legitimacy given to the country by the people”.
He added that they “repelled Western officials’ statements about the legitimacy of the government, the constitution and the motherland.”
Assad took over as president after the death of his father Hafez in 2000. In 1970, Hafez seized power in a bloodless military coup.
There is no doubt that he will be re-elected amidst the downturn. Assad received 95.1% of the vote, and officials said that out of approximately 18 million registered voters, the turnout rate was 78.6%. The election vote lasted only one day, and no independent monitor was established.
The competition is symbolic, with two little-known candidates competing with Assad. In the 2014 election, he won nearly 89% of the vote.
At the beginning of his new term, the country was still suffering from 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of people died, and the country fell into a further worsening economic crisis.
Nearly half of Syria’s pre-war population was either displaced or became refugees living in neighboring countries or Europe. The war left tens of thousands of people missing and the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
The United Nations estimates that more than 80% of Syrians live below the poverty line. The value of the Syrian currency has fallen sharply, and basic services and resources have become scarce or provided at excessively high parallel market prices.
The fighting has basically subsided, but parts of Syria are still out of government control, and foreign troops and armed groups are deployed in different parts of the country.
The conflict that began in 2011 began with the government’s suppression of peaceful protests, and the anti-Assad family’s decades of rule turned into an armed rebellion.
Assad has been subject to expanding sanctions and isolated by the West, but he has the support of Iran and Russia, which have sent troops and aid to support him in fighting rebel groups.
The European and American governments blamed most of the war atrocities on Assad and his assistants, while Assad called the armed opposition “terrorists,” and the UN-led negotiations to end the conflict did not make any progress.
American and European officials questioned the legitimacy of the election, saying it violated the UN resolution to resolve the conflict, lacked any international supervision, and did not represent the will of all Syrians.
Despite the ceasefire agreement reached last year, war monitors and rescuers reported that the government shelled a village in the last enclave controlled by rebels in northwestern Syria, killing at least five people, including two girls and their grandmother.
Volunteer search and rescue organizations, the White Helmets (White Helmets) or the “Syrian Civil Defence Organization” operating in areas controlled by the Syrian rebels said that two volunteers were injured in shelling in the village of Saraje, Idlib.
In recent weeks, as government forces strive to restore control of the territory, violence in the enclave has escalated, and nearly 4 million people live here.
In 2020, Turkey, which supports the Syrian opposition, reached a truce with Russia, which deployed troops in the region, and a government air and ground operation supported by Russia to retake the region was stopped.
According to UNICEF, 512 children were confirmed to have been killed in the fighting in Syria last year, most of them in the northwest, where there are 1.7 million vulnerable children, many of whom were moved around due to violence.
.