A video posted by the Syrian Presidency on YouTube showed Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad driving to Eastern Ghouta on Sunday (March 18). Assad paid his first visit in years to the battered enclave to congratulate his troops for their bloody assault on rebels.
Syrian state television also broadcast photos of the president dressed in a shirt and jacket surrounded by soldiers, some perched on a tank behind him, in an unspecified part of Eastern Ghouta.
Rebels have held out in Eastern Ghouta since 2012, but a regime assault in the last month has retaken more than 80 percent of the former opposition bastion, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor says. / AFP PHOTO / Syrian Presidency Facebook page / HO
Rebels have held out in Eastern Ghouta since 2012, but a regime assault in the last month has retaken more than 80 percent of the former opposition bastion.
“The inhabitants of Damascus are more than grateful and they will maybe tell their children in the coming decades how you saved the capital,” Assad told soldiers in a video released by his office.
The ferocious air and ground campaign against Eastern Ghouta has killed over 1,400 civilians since it was launched on February 18, a Britain-based monitor says, and sparked international outrage.
In that time some 50 civilians, including 10 children, have been killed by rebel shelling of Damascus, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. (Agence France Presse)