The United States on Wednesday denounced as “repulsive” an Instagram site by Syrian President Bashar Assad, saying it did not reflect the reality of the civil war.<\/p>\n
The embattled Syrian leader’s office took to the social media site to post pictures that include Assad greeting supporters and his wife Asma comforting the injured.<\/p>\n
“This is nothing more than a despicable PR stunt,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.<\/p>\n
“It’s repulsive that the Assad regime would use this to gloss over the brutality and suffering it’s causing,” she said.<\/p>\n
Harf said the Instagram account ignored the “horrific atrocities” in Homs and elsewhere in Syria.<\/p>\n
“We would encourage people to take a look at unfiltered photos of what’s actually happening on the ground,” Harf said.<\/p>\n
Comments on the Instagram account praise the secular-minded Assad for fighting “terrorism” and Islamists and criticize foreign media coverage of the conflict.<\/p>\n
However, occasional comments on the account — instagram\/com\/syrianpresidency — blamed Assad for civilian deaths.<\/p>\n
Users need to follow the account to leave comments, providing a way to remove critical remarks.<\/p>\n
The United Nations says that more than 100,000 people have died in a war that erupted when security forces cracked down on dissent in March 2011.<\/p>\n
The United States has called for Assad to step down and is assisting the mostly Sunni rebels.<\/p>\n
But unlike Sunni Arab monarchies such as Qatar, the United States says it is only providing “non-lethal” aid.<\/p>\n
Source:Agence France Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The United States on Wednesday denounced as “repulsive” an Instagram site by Syrian President Bashar Assad, saying it did not reflect the reality of the civil war.<\/p>\n
The embattled Syrian leader’s office took to the social media site to post pictures that include Assad greeting supporters and his wife Asma comforting the injured.<\/p>\n
“This is nothing more than a despicable PR stunt,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.<\/p>\n
“It’s repulsive that the Assad regime would use this to gloss over the brutality and suffering it’s causing,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}