“On the border area with Lebanon where [Hezbollah forces] want to protect themselves and cooperate with us, but they don’t exist all over Syria.”

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

You can forge anything these days, and we’re living in a fake news era.

Some of these agendas wanted me to quit, very simply, so they said “we have all the guarantees if you want to leave, and all the money and everything you want.” Of course, you just ignore that.

The external support can never substitute internal support, the example that we have to look at very well is Egypt and Tunisia ; they have all the support from the West and from the Gulf and from most of the countries of the world.

As we see now the American officials, they say something in the morning and they do the opposite in the evening. So, you cannot judge those people according to what they say. You cannot take them at their words, to be frank.

When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.

Any strike will be as direct support to Al-Qaeda offshoot that’s called Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. You’re right about this. It’s going to be direct support.

It’s not religious war, but Al-Qaeda always use religions, Islam – actually, as a pretext and as a cover and as a mantle for their war and for their terrorism and for their killing and beheading and so on.

Actually, the terrorists have been killing our people since the beginning of this crisis two years and a half ago, and the Syrian people wanted the government and the state institutions and the army and the police to defend them, and that’s what happened.

[The Jews] tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.

Actually, he gave false evidence [of chemical weapons]. In this case,[John] Kerry didn’t even present any evidence. He talked “we have evidence” and he didn’t present anything. Not yet, nothing so far ; not a single shred of evidence.

If there is any change regarding that hope, we should ask the Syrian people, not anyone else in the world.

You look at [terrorists] faces, they look foreigners, but where are they coming from ? How precise this estimate is difficult to tell, but definitely the majority are Al-Qaeda.

Whether [Turkey] is a NATO country or not, it doesn’t have the right to invade any other country according to the international law or to any other moral value.

When you use an armament, you use it to defend the civilians. You kill terrorists in order to defend civilians. That’s the natural role of any army in the world.

That the rebels or the terrorists used the chemical weapons in northern Aleppo five months ago [in 2013].

I am very familiar with Hungary, because I grew up in Romania, which borders it.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Hezbollah fighters are on the borders with Lebanon where the terrorists attacked them. On the borders with Lebanon, this is where Hezbollah retaliated, and this is where we have cooperation, and that’s good.

[Hezbollah forces] cannot exist all over Syria anyway, for many reasons, but they exist on the borders.

Thank God we’re going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

Since problems spill across borders, security anywhere depends on sustainable development everywhere.

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

In my state [ Maryland] we’ve lost jobs to NAFTA, we did not gain jobs from NAFTA. But I think it’s very difficult when your state is right up against the northern border, you do see things differently.