The situation in Syria is causing a propaganda war, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday after a Saudi newspaper claimed a Russian diplomat had said in an interview that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is ready to resign.
“We would like to emphasize that the report [in the newspaper] is not true, and the Russian representative has not given any such interview,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova said.
A number of western media earlier cited the Al Watan newspaper’s report. The Saudi publication quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov in reported speech as saying that Assad’s brother Maher lost his legs in a Damascus explosion in July and that the president may soon resign.
“Regretfully, we have to state that the situation in Syria is becoming an object of a propaganda war, some of whose participants do not stop short of using dirty tricks,” Zakharova said.
“It is no secret either that some media, which from the very start covered events in Syria tendentiously… distort Russia’s principled position and sometimes even resort to open misinformation,” she said.
A few chief editors have changed at Al Watan in the past year. Some experts describe the publication as a tabloid.
The Syrian conflict has claimed between 14,000 and 20,000 lives since March 2011, according to estimates by various opposition groups and the UN. The West is pushing for Assad’s ouster, while Russia and China are trying to prevent outside interference in the country, claiming the Assad regime and the opposition are both to blame for the bloodshed.
