Bashar al-Assad says he doesn't take it personally when he's called a 'war criminal'

Speaking with American reporters and researchers Monday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who promised he would be "very transparent and talk about everything," fielded questions about war crimes, the U.S. government, and the Islamic State.

The meeting at his palace in Damascus was the finale of a conference the government put on, bringing the press to a country that has been roiled by civil war for the past five years. It's believed that at least 500,000 Syrians have died in the war, and millions have been driven from their homes. As the government continues to fight rebel groups, many have called Assad a war criminal, and The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins asked Assad how that made him feel. "There's nothing personal about it — I am just a headline," he said. "The headline is, 'The bad president, the bad guy, is killing the good guys. They are freedom fighters.' And so on. You know this. It's black and white."

Assad denied he is a brutal dictator, asking: "How can I be president if I am killing my people and my people are against me? This is disconnected from reality." He went on to point out that it wasn't his country that "attacked Iraq without a mandate from the United Nations — it was the United States and Britain and her allies. It wasn't us who attacked Libya and destroyed the government, whether it's a good government or a bad government. That's not the question. Even if you have the worst government in Libya, it's not your mission, the United States or any other government, to change the government of foreign countries." Assad said he does not feel he's treated fairly by the Western press, and claims the U.S. is lying when it says it's fighting ISIS — they really are working to "expand ISIS" in order to destroy his regime. "They want to change Syria, and we are not going to allow this," he said.

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