When you talk about humanitarian, it doesn't only mean to offer the people the help, the food, their necessary needs for their life. The first thing, if you ask the Syrian refugees, for example, the first thing they want is to go back to their country.

We don't have a lot of expectations [for Donald J. Trump] because the American administration is not only about the President; it's about different powers within this administration, the different lobbies that they are going to influence any President.

The Israeli lobby has clout in the U.S., which means that re-arranging the region and controlling its resources one way or another, will serve Israel through its control over the American administration.

If you want to be transparent with your people, do not do anything cosmetic, whether to deceive your people or to get some applaud from the West.

The criteria or the paradigm for us is not the West, not the Western paradigm, because the West has its own culture, we have our own culture, they have their own reality, we have our own reality.

In the war, you lose areas, but you recapture another area. So, it is difficult to tell whether you are losing or gaining or it was a standstill. No-one has this answer.

Any strike will be as direct support to Al-Qaeda offshoot that's called Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. You're right about this. It's going to be direct support.