The former Syrian leader and his family are safe and living in the Russian capital without any issues, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said<\/p>\n
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has rejected rumors that former Syrian Bashar Assad has been poisoned, saying that Assad and his family are safe in Moscow and have been living there without any problems since being granted asylum.
\nEarlier this month, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) cited an anonymous source as claiming that Assad had been discharged from a hospital in Moscow Region after a supposed poisoning attempt in September. The rumor has since been widely circulated by both Western and Russian media outlets.
\nSOHR consists of a single individual \u2013 Rami Abdulrahman \u2013 who runs the organization from his home in Coventry, England, which also functions as a clothing shop. SOHR\u2019s reports on the war in Syria have been cited by Western governments and media, although it has consistently faced accusations of anti-Assad bias and sympathy toward armed opposition groups.
\nLavrov stressed that Assad \u201chas no problem living in our capital\u201d and that \u201cno poisonings have occurred.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIf such rumors appear, I leave them to the conscience of those who spread them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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The minister added that Russia had provided asylum to Assad and his family \u201cfor purely humanitarian reasons,\u201d noting that they had faced threats of physical harm after last year\u2019s change of power in Damascus.
\nLavrov drew parallels with the 2011 conflict in Libya, recalling Muammar Gaddafi\u2019s public killing which was widely broadcast on television \u2013 an event that the Russian foreign minister said \u201cdelighted Hillary Clinton, who watched his physical annihilation live and clapped her hands.\u201d
\nAssad, a longtime Russian ally, was overthrown last December when forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized Damascus. The situation in Syria has remained unstable since, with clashes between Islamist factions and government units under the new leadership.
\nRussia has maintained its military presence at the Khmeimim Airbase and Tartus naval facility, and says it plans to repurpose them for humanitarian operations in coordination with the Syrian authorities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The former Syrian leader and his family are safe and living in the Russian capital without any issues, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}