DM Monitoring
DAMASCUS: Bashar al-Assad has been re-elected for a fourth term as president of war-torn Syria with 95.1 percent of the votes cast in government-held areas, official results have shown, after a vote dismissed by the opposition and Western powers as a sham.
Wednesday’s controversial presidential vote was the second since the beginning of Syria’s uprising-turned-war a decade ago, a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, forced millions to leave the country and wrecked its infrastructure. Head of parliament Hammouda Sabbagh announced the results at a news conference on Thursday, saying voter turnout was about 78 percent, with more than 14 million Syrians taking part.
Standing against al-Assad were two obscure candidates: former deputy cabinet minister Abdallah Salloum Abdallah and Mahmud Ahmad Marei, a member of the so-called “tolerated opposition”, long dismissed by exiled opposition leaders as an extension of al-Assad’s government.
