{"id":6690,"date":"2013-07-01T15:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T15:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/?p=6690"},"modified":"2025-09-25T10:17:36","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T10:17:36","slug":"ribal-al-assad-tells-the-bbc-during-his-visit-to-washington-d-c-why-we-should-not-be-arming-the-syrian-rebels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/ribal-al-assad-tells-the-bbc-during-his-visit-to-washington-d-c-why-we-should-not-be-arming-the-syrian-rebels\/","title":{"rendered":"Ribal Al-Assad tells the BBC during his visit to Washington D.C, why we should not be arming the Syrian rebels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>More than 100,000 people have died and millions have been displaced in Syria&#8217;s two-year long conflict, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad shows no inclination to step down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ribal al-Assad, Mr Assad&#8217;s first cousin, says he does not expect the Syrian leader to leave the country of his own accord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s gone too far,&#8221; Ribal al-Assad, founder of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria, told the BBC&#8217;s Katty Kay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But he warns the US and other Western countries should reconsider supporting the rebels in order to avoid facilitating a fundamentalist take-over in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t want Syria becoming another Iran, where we replaced a dictatorship with a theocracy.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Please see below link for the interview in full.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More than 100,000 people have died and millions have been displaced in Syria&#8217;s two-year long conflict, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad shows no inclination to step down. Ribal al-Assad, Mr Assad&#8217;s first cousin, says he does not expect the Syrian leader to leave the country of his own accord. &#8220;He&#8217;s gone too far,&#8221; Ribal al-Assad, [&hellip;]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2949,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-videos"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6701,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions\/6701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/odf-syria.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}