Syrian President Bashar Assad disputed the United Nations’ death toll numbers of the six-year conflict in an interview with Sputnik, arguing that the West uses inflated figures to justify intervention.
DAMASCUS (Sputnik) — He maintained that neither the UN nor any other monitors have the means to calculate the number of casualties because of various factions on the ground, including “foreigners, Syrians and terrorists.”
“It’s tens of thousands, not like what you hear in the media about hundreds of thousands. Of course, we can talk about thousands of missing people that we don’t know anything about their fate. This is the official number,” Assad said.
“So, the numbers that we’ve been hearing in the Western media during the last six years were not precise, it’s only to inflate the number just to show how horrible the situation [is], to use it as humanitarian pretext to intervene in Syria,” Assad said.