Bashar al-Assad wins re-election victory, 3 dead on riots that followed
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will maintain his position as president, according to the results of a landslide vote. Assad won the election with 88.7 percent of votes; however, opponents criticize the circumstances of the election reports SRN News.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad may be seeing US missiles soon as approval to use force against the Assad regime took a step forward Wednesday. photo donkeyhotey donkeyhotey.wordpress.com
Voting only took place in the western and central regions of Syria, where Assad’s supporters primarily reside.
Critics also argue that a credible election cannot be held in the midst of a three-year civil war that has killed 160,000 people and displaced millions.
Around 1.5 million persons have departed the country as migrants, while another 2.35 million people have fled the country as refugees. By the end of 2013, refugees from Syria had become the largest refugee population in the world, notes al-Jazeera.
There report noted that “According to the report, more than half of all school-age children (51.8 percent) no longer attend school. School nonattendance reached 90 percent in al-Raqqa and Aleppo and 68 percent in the suburbs of Damascus. By the end of 2013, 4,000 schools were out of service because they were destroyed, damaged or had been transformed to camps for internally displaced persons …”
Parliamentary speaker Mohammad al-Laham made the announcement of Assad’s landslide win. “I declare the victory of Dr. Bashar Hafez al-Assad as president of the Syrian Arab Republic with an absolute majority of the votes cast in the election.”
Before Laham made the announcement, Assad’s supporters had already erupted in celebratory riots. Three people died and 10 were injured from celebratory gunfire in the capital city of Damascus.
Secretary of State John Kerry criticized the results of the questionable election. “With respect to the elections that took place, the so-called election, the election are non-election, the elections are a great big zero. They are meaningless, and they are meaningless because you can’t have an election where million of your people don’t even have the ability to vote, where they don’t have the ability to contest the election, and they have no choice,” he said.
