The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, denied that he was responsible for starting the bloody conflict tearing his country apart in an interview broadcast last week on German television.
The interview, featured in a new documentary on the conflict in Syria by the filmmaker Hubert Seipel, was conducted in English but later overdubbed in German for broadcast on the network ARD. Mr. Seipel, whose previous film, âI, Putin,â was also a portrait of a strongman, provided The Lede with an edit of the documentary in which Mr. Assadâs remarks can be heard in the original English.
The filmmaker said recently tha he wanted to speak directly to Mr. Assad because âmisinformation and psychological warfare make up a large part of the Syrian civil war.â He explained in an e-mail to The Lede that he was frustrated by watching Syriaâs war unfold in YouTube clips selectively edited by the two sides. So, he said, âmy intention was just to let Assad speak about his point of view, so that our viewers an make their own judgment in what kind of a separate world he lives.â
Readers can click on the text of the soundbites below the video player to skip ahead to just those parts of the documentary in which Mr. Assad speaks. (The full film, with German narration, also includes interviews in English with Kofi Annan, the former United Nations envoy, and Sergey Lavrov, Russiaâs foreign minister.)
After the documentary was broadcast, the Russian foreign ministry posted video and a transcript of Mr. Lavrovâs complete conversation with Mr. Seipel online.
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