Credit. Jakarta Globe
Beirut. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad performed Eid prayers in a Damascus mosque on Sunday, state television showed, in his first appearance in public since a July bombing in the Syrian capital that killed four top security officials.
Assad, who is battling a 17-month-old uprising, was accompanied by his prime minister but not his vice president, Farouk al-Shara, whose reported defection was denied by the government the previous day.
In the state TV footage, Assad was sitting cross-legged during a sermon in which Syria was described as the victim of a conspiracy hatched by the United States, Israel, the West and Arab states but which would not “defeat our Islam, our ideology and our determination in Syria.”