We had elections in communist Czechslovakia too, where the party got 99% of votes, just like with Assads. Was it democratic? No. It is frankly ridiculous to say that any elections with these kinds of results are in any way meaningful expressions of popular support.

We also had forced demonstration of support for the government. Had to go into parades, etc.

The question is if you would be willing to go there now and publicly propose that Assad should not be a president, without fear of being thrown into prison?

Also what do you think of experiences of people who were tortured and killed by his subordinates for expressing dissent on facebook, or twitter, or in demonstrations?

>internationally observed election

Key words

>The question is if you would be willing to go there now and publicly propose that Assad should not be a president, without fear of being thrown into prison?

Not right now, they are in a state of civil war, I'd wait until it's over and things settle down.

just going to prison in Syria is very lenient punishment [0]

[0] www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/middleeast/syria-executions-amnesty-international-report/

"he's extremely popular"

Oh right. So what's with all those people who want him to stop being in charge so much that there's been a civil war raging for years? How popular can he be if so many people are willing to risk their lives to move him out of power? To have a civil war, he's surely got to be massively unpopular with a large segment of society.

It's not a "civil war" just because you have units of opposing factions operating in the same country. The problem with the "rebels" is that they are not considered better, I assume because of their secondary motives (fundamentalism, Sharia law, ...) [1]

Also, some of the factions seem to be heavily influenced / supported by foreign powers [2]

Taken together, every war is somewhere on a scale between "civil war" and "ordinary war" and just calling it a "civil war" doesn't mean it's necessarily one.

Of course, since war is unpopular, all interventionist democracies would like you to believe that it's a civil war and they're not meddling at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%9...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria#War.2C...

large segment of society you describe can still be 10% of it (random number). ie if 10% of Switzerland decided to overthrow their democratically elected government, you would have 700,000 'terrorists' immediately, most with their mandatory military weapons stored at home.

but, we speak about Switzerland. don't forget many in middle east conflicts are mercenaries or volunteers from all over the world

Assad needs to be prosecuted for war crimes against his own people.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/07/saydna...

Sure once a legitimate investigation provides proof.