The United States has been trying to manipulate the Syrian presidential election in a way that would grant suffrage to millions of Syrians who oppose President Bashar Assad as Washington continues to try and oust him from power, former UK Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford told Sputnik.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th December, 2018) The United States has been trying to manipulate the Syrian presidential election in a way that would grant suffrage to millions of Syrians who oppose President Bashar Assad as Washington continues to try and oust him from power, former UK Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford told Sputnik.
"The Americans sometimes pretend that their goal is not the removal of Assad ... What the Americans would like to happen, what they are trying to engineer are elections which would include in the electorate the millions of Syrian refugees who, the Americans believe, would vote against Assad," Ford said.
Washington, London and Berlin, he said, like to talk about political transition "in the end of which there is no Assad," but the only transition there can be is transition to more Assad who will not commit political suicide after securing a military victory.
"The Americans and the European allies are insistent that in any future Syrian election the voters must include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of opponents of Assad living in places like Germany, and France, and Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, so the Americans want to engineer Assad's removal as a result of political process, but their objective is absolutely clear and unambiguous regime change," he explained.
US Special Representative for Syria Engagement Jim Jeffrey told RIA Novosti and the Kommersant newspaper last month that Washington was "not committed to any kind of regime change" and would let the Syrian people have the final say.
Many Western officials insisted on Assad's resignation, calling it the main precondition for the Syrian settlement. Assad has repeatedly said that the future of Syria depends on the will of the Syrian people.
