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 U.S. and Britain are incapable of controlling all of Iraq.

[Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia] are here because they could offer very essential and important help, because the situation that we are facing now is not only about a few terrorists from within Syria; it's like international war against Syria.

At the very beginning, it was fully political. When you have these terrorists, the first part of the same plan which is political should start with stopping the smuggling of terrorists coming from abroad, stopping the logistic support, the money, all kinds of support coming to these terrorists.

You have to look at the reality in Syria. Whenever we liberate any city or village from the terrorists, the civilians will go back to the city, while they flee that city when the terrorists attack that area, the opposite. So, they flee, first of all, the war itself; they flee the area under the control of the terrorists, they flee the difficult situation because of the embargo by the West on Syria.

We are the fault line; if you don't deal with this fault line, you're going to have an earthquake, that's what we always said.

America is interested in re-arranging the region as it sees fit.