Syria's Assad vows to continue crackdown

He has nothing to do with increased pressure from the Arab League to end it.In video footage on the newspapers website, Assad said his state had no policy to be cruel with citizens. Asked if his forces had been too aggressive, Assad told the newspaper mistakes had been made but these were the fault of individuals, not the state.Saying harsh or aggressive is a subjective term. So it is better to talk about the policy of the government, who dont have any policy to be harsh because all our policy doing in the past decade has been based on the support of the public in Syria, so it cannot be against the public, he told Britains Sunday Times newspaper.If there is any mistakes committed by some of the personnel in the apparatus it could be dealt through the investigation committee that we formed during the last few months. But when you have instability you may have some problems, you may have some mistakes in the street, he added.The United Nations says 3,500 people have been killed during the crackdown on the protests which began in March, but Assad disputed this and put the number killed at 619. He told the paper that 800 government forces had been killed.Talking about the killing - you have to ask who killed the 800 officers and soldiers and policemen in the streets.Assad defended that demonstrations were not peaceful, and vowed to continue the crackdown.We are not talking about peaceful demonstrations, we are talking about militants. Whenever you have militants you have killing. So the role of the government is to fight those militants in order to restore the stability and to protect the civilians, not by leaving them to do what they want to do and talk about killing, This is our job and that is what we are doing now.Assad said further attacks could be prevented hindering the smuggling of arms from neighbouring countries.We have to prevent militants from doing what they are doing now - killing civilians, doing massacres in different places in Syria. We have to stop the smuggling of armaments from outside Syria, from the borders of neighbouring countries. We have to stop having the money coming in to support those militants again across the borders. That is what we have to do,he told the paper.Assad said there was no limit to what he was willing to do for Syria,I have no limit to do anything to save the country. I am here to serve the country. My country is not here to serve me.In video footage on the newspapers website, Assad said there would be elections in February or March when Syrians would vote for a parliament to create a new constitution and that would include provision for a presidential ballot.We are going to have elections in February, or maybe March. We are going to have a new Parliament and after that a new government. We are going to have a new constitution. That constitution will set the basis of how to elect the president - if they need a president or dont need him, they have the elections - they can go and participate in it. The ballot boxes will decide who should be president, he said.The Arab League, a powerful political group of Arab states, set a deadline on Saturday for Syria to comply with a peace plan, involving a military pullout from around restive areas, and threatened sanctions if Assad failed to halt the violence.However, activists from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 12 civilians were killed in raids by government forces on Saturday while two army defectors died when they clashed with the army in Homs, which has become a centre of armed revolt against more than 40 years of Assad family rule.Assad said the Arab Leagues intervention could provide a pretext for Western military action and repeated a past statement that such a move against Syria would create an earthquake across the Middle East.The newspaper said Assad had promised to personally fight and die to resist foreign forces.Assad also vowed to prevent further attacks by the Free Syrian Army, which opposition sources said had killed or wounded at least 20 security police in an assault on an Air Force Intelligence Complex near Damascus two days ago