Beirut:Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad on Sunday visited army positions in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, the president’s Telegram account said.
“In the line of fire in Eastern Ghouta … President Assad with heroes of the Syrian Arab army,” a caption said. It is the Syrian leader’s first trip to the former rebel enclave outside Damascus in years.
Syria state television broadcast photos of the president dressed in a shirt and jacket surrounded by soldiers, some perched on a tank behind him, in an unspecified part of Eastern Ghouta. The photographs were taken in a street lined with damaged building fronts with a couple of parked tanks.
Rebels have held out in Eastern Ghouta since 2012, but a regime assault in the last month has retaken more than 80 percent of the former opposition bastion, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor says.
-Arab News
