President Al-Assad and Mrs. Asma Al-Assad visit quake-hit Lattakia

President Bashar Al-Assad and Mrs. Asma Al-Assad on Saturday arrived in the city of Lattakia and visited Tishreen University Hospital where they inspected the conditions of the injured due to the earthquake.

President al-Assad and Mrs. Asma visited survivors Doha Nour Al-Din and her son Ibrahim Zakarya who were pulled by rescue teams from the rubble in Jableh yesterday evening 5 days after the earthquake.

The president and his wife also visited the affected families residing in the temporary shelter center at “Martyr Basel Al-Assad Educational Training Center” and they were briefed on the families’ conditions.

President Al-Assad and Mrs. Asma Al-Assad also inspected the rescue and rubble removal operations and met with the Syrian and Russian rescue teams in Ghazalat neighborhood in Jableh

In reply to a question by media outlets on the gap that appeared in the way the West and the international community dealt with earthquake disaster in Syria, President Al-Assad said that the West hasn’t changed its position towards Syria in terms of humanitarian cases in general and regardless of the earthquake, pointing out that when he talks about the West, he doesn’t mean the people, but the politicians.

President Al-Assad hailed the state of Arab solidarity and sympathy with Syria. He said “we, as Arabs, are emotional and we have the same national belongingness, so this state of sympathy and solidarity, at the popular level before the official level, is normal and we should build on such cases and think deeply so that we overcome the image circulated by social media and international propaganda about human beings turning into robots without feelings or values, which is absolutely wrong.”

The President emphasized that work in coming stage must not only concentrate on the humanitarian response by carrying out rescue operations and securing humanitarian needs, like food and shelter, rather, we must work to achieve a bigger goal which is reconstructing and achieving development in a better way than the one before the earthquake.”

Hamda Mustafa