Bashar al-Assad eyes crushing win in controversial Syria vote

  

Assad is facing two little-known challengers and is expected to win a crushing victory despite the three-year-old civil war which the United Nations has warned is likely to drag on even longer as a result of the election.

  

There was no voting in the roughly 60 percent of the country outside the control of Assad's government, which include large areas of second city Aleppo.

  

But polling was held in the heart of third city Homs, in ruins after rebel forces pulled out early last month following a devastating two-year siege in a boost for the president whose family has held power in Syria for more than 40 years.

  

In the capital, which is firmly under the government's control despite periodic rebel bombardment from the suburbs, voters were already queueing outside polling stations before they opened at 7 am (0400 GMT).

  

Billboards glorifying Assad cover the city's streets although inside polling stations photographs of his two challengers -- Hassan al-Nuri and Maher al-Hajjar -- had been put up alongside the president's.

  

None of the voters questioned by AFP said they had voted for the challengers, who are both drawn from the ranks of the government-tolerated opposition.

  

But there were plenty of voters who voiced passionate support for the president. 

Hind al-Homsi, 46, said she had made a small cut in her finger and left a bloody fingerprint on the circle underneath Assad's name.

  

"I want to vote in blood for the president. He is the best," she told AFP.

  

-- Voting Assad 'of course' --

    

Nadia Hazim said she would "vote for the president -- of course".

In the central city of Homs, security forces deployed in strength a day after a truck bomb killed 10 people in the nearby countryside.

 

"The war with the terrorists will continue, but I think the situation will improve after the election," said Saleh Ali Mayyassa, a 50-year-old civil servant.

 

"We are voting to show the world that the people are choosing their leader."

 

The interior ministry says more than 15 million Syrians are eligible to vote, adding to the 200,000 who already cast votes abroad last week.

 

At least 162,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against Assad's rule erupted in March 2011. Nearly half the population have fled their homes with some 2.7 million finding refuge abroad.

 

Foreign governments allied to Assad -- Iran, North Korea and Russia -- sent observers to monitor the election, but their presence was unlikely to boost the credibility of the poll in the eyes of Western governments which have dubbed it a mockery of democracy.

  

-- Peace talks distant prospect --

    

The United Nations has warned that the election will only complicate efforts to relaunch peace talks after two rounds of abortive negotiations in Switzerland early this year.

  

The exiled opposition has made Assad's departure from power a precondition for any negotiated settlement and his re-election for a new seven-year term is likely to scupper any hope of getting them back to the negotiating table any time soon.

  

But Waddah Abed Rabbo, chief editor of pro-Assad newspaper Al-Watan, argued that the election could facilitate a resumption of talks.

  

"In Geneva, the opposition made its rejection of Assad running in the presidential election a priority at the talks. Assad was a red line that blocked everything," Abed Rabbo said.

  

"Now that he will be voted back in by a majority, there will be no objection by the authorities to discuss other issues."

  

Noah Bonsey of Brussel-based think-tank the International Crisis Group said the election was part of a broader effort by the Assad government to portray its eventual victory as inevitable but that it was likely only to prolong an increasingly devastating war.

  

"The regime can only gain ground after reducing it to rubble, and can only hold it in so far as it remains empty of its original inhabitants," Bonsey said.

  

"This was the regime's approach before the election and it remains so after it. It leads to continued war, not victory."