President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has claimed that unnamed foreign governments are behind a three stage plan to destabilise the country and bring down his government.  

Speaking to Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, al-Assad claimed that the first stage had been to pay demonstrators to take part in protests.

Protestors were initially paid $10, rising to $50 as it became clear to those funding the protests that creating another 'Tahrir Square' uprising was not going to be easy. Assad claimed that

They wanted to take people into streets like it was in Egypt or Tunisia. But they couldn't do it.

Having failed to trigger a popular uprising, the second stage of the plan was the creation of 'liberated' areas within the country. The attempt to militarise some territories, said al-Assad, was

Like the Benghazi model in Libya. But our army didn't allow that.

In Libya's Benghazi, British SAS were on the ground advising and training rebels from the start of the supposedly spontaneous rebel uprising. French, Quatari and Jordanian special forces also later aided the Libyan rebels, supported by NATO's massive and illegal air bombardment and resulting in Gaddafi's murder and his country's assimilation into the West's new world order.

The Syrian army's decisive crackdown on militarised rebel strongholds such as Homs has led to stage three in the foreign meddlers' plan - a campaign of brutal destabilisation involving, said al-Assad

Assassinations, bombing of state institutions, massacres targeting civilians and kidnappings.

Whilst it is certainly possible that al-Assad is exaggerating or lying about foreign involvement in the destabilisation of Syria, a wealth of evidence supports his claims. It has been widely acknowledged that the Syrian Free Army are being armed by the West and several Arab states. The presence of Al Qaeda in Syria has been admitted by both the US and British governments, whilst al-Assad's claims that Islamic terrorists are behind the worst violence have been either ignored or dismissed by the West.

The role of foreign intervention is described in the interview as "significant" by al-Assad, which he said was more harmful than any mistakes that had been made by the Syrian government.