Assad is hoping Isis will make his regime look moderate. This is no accident

Jeremy Bowen’s half-hour long interview with Bashar al-Assad is being heavily trailed by the BBC this morning.  And while it has little that is new it does provide an interesting insight into the Syrian President’s current situation.

The main story from it is Assad’s confirmation that there is some line of communication between the Syrian regime and the Americans. Bowen put to Assad that there are American planes over Syria all the time engaged in the fight against Isis and that there must be some contact between them. While confirming that they do not speak directly, Assad did confirm that Iraq and other countries act as intermediaries.  But it was the way in which Assad said this that was most interesting.

Assad: ‘There’s information but not dialogue.’

Bowen: ‘They tell you things?’

Assad: ‘Something like this.’

Bowen: ‘Do you tell them things?’

Assad: ‘No’

Then Assad sniggers.  It has never been an uncommon tic among Assad’s many tics that he sniggers at odd moments.  But there is something particularly striking about it here, coming as it does during an interview in which he is obviously trying very hard to exert an aura of calm and control.

Obviously he only agreed to do the interview because he wants to be seen as a practical, human, interested party in a time of Isis-dominated madness. On the barbarities of his own regime he swots questions away.  He dismisses accounts of killings of civilians as ‘childish’.  Other aspects of the regime’s brutal suppression over the last four years are rejected as ‘not realistic’.  In denying the well-documented use of barrel-bombs which kill civilians indiscriminately the President twice makes a strange joke that the army do not use ‘cooking pots’ against civilians either.  When the discussion turns to the apparent use of chlorine gas Assad points out that chlorine can be found in any household.