Posted by Scott Lucas | May 24, 2021 |
A man rides a bicycle past campaign billboards of Bashar al-Assad, Damascus, May 23, 2021 (Louai Beshara/AFP)
UPDATE, MAY 24: Syrians abroad have spoken about the staging of Wednesday’s Presidential “election” to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.
Saed Eido, originally from Aleppo and now in Gaziantep in southeast Turkey, said:
My brother disappeared into a regime prison in 2013. We still have no idea if he is alive or dead. They won’t give us any information. All this Presidential election does is whitewash crimes and maintain a dictatorship.
With State media featuring gatherings for Assad but not the other two nominal candidates Mahmoud Ahmad Mar’ai and Abdallah Saloum Abdallah Suhail al-Ghazi, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, explains: