Early Monday evening, Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, stood at the front door of his palace in central Damascus to meet a group of American reporters and researchers. Tall and slender, dressed in a blue suit and tie, Assad greeted each of us with a smile and a handshake. His house—a large, ornate structure built in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire—is situated inside a secure zone, behind a maze of checkpoints and blast walls. Assad, who speaks English from his time as a medical student in England, seemed eager to begin. “I’m going to be very transparent and talk about everything,” he said.

In the five and a half years since the uprising in Syria began, it has become the most catastrophic war of our young century, and Assad the most vilified national leader in the world. As many as four hundred thousand Syrians are dead, and some eleven million—nearly half the country’s population—have been driven from their homes. Hundreds of thousands have fled to Europe; hundreds of those have drowned in the Mediterranean. Assad has been branded a war criminal, lambasted for his government’s use of torture, bombardment of civilians, and deployment of chlorine gas. Most of the governments in the West, including that of the United States, have severed diplomatic relations; President Obama has called on him repeatedly to step down.

Despite the ostracism, Assad has remained in power, thanks in large part to the West’s reluctance to involve itself heavily in the conflict, and to a decisive military intervention on his behalf by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Aleppo, once the country’s economic center, is largely in ruins, and the government, through a series of brutal bombings, is besieging the last enclave outside its grip. Damascus, though surrounded by rebel groups, is remarkably quiet, and, throughout Syria, a majority of citizens who have not fled the country live in areas controlled by the government. Assad’s fortunes are higher than they have been at any time since the war began. This week, in a sign of confidence, his allies staged a conference in the capital to argue their case to Western reporters and researchers, and a small number of government officials. The visit to his palace came at the end of the conference, as a kind of closing statement.

In a sitting room off a large marble foyer, I asked Assad what it felt like to be branded a war criminal. “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 the freedom fighters.’ And so on. You know this. It’s black and white.” He rejected the voluminous testimony and documentary evidence that his regime has engaged in barbarous acts against its own citizens. In a report issued this year, Human Rights Watch accused the Assad government of “deliberate and indiscriminate air strikes on civilians,” including the use of so-called barrel bombs—typically, metal drums filled with high explosives and scrap metal—in areas packed with civilians.

In his defense, Assad pointed out that, in an election held in government-controlled areas in 2014, he won nearly ninety per cent of the vote. At the time, a State Department spokeswoman dismissed the election result, saying that it “continues a forty-year family legacy of violent suppression that brutally crushes political dissent.” For Assad, though, it was proof of his people’s loyalty. “Let’s suppose that these allegations are correct and this is a President who is killing his own people and committed crimes, and the Free World and the West is helping the Syrian people against the bad guy,” he said. “After five and a half years, who supported me? How can I be President if I am killing my people and my people are against me? This is disconnected from reality.”

Assad seemed relaxed and engaged, gesturing and sometimes laughing. But, pressed on the subject of war crimes, he preferred to talk about the hypocrisies of Western leaders. “We’re not the ones who attacked Iraq without a mandate from the United Nations—it was the United States and Britain and her allies,” he said. “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 expressed a frustration sometimes heard in extreme partisan circles in the United States—that it is impossible to get a fair hearing in the established media. The Western press, he said, publishes countless stories on his regime, while ignoring the crimes of the rebels. “The cultural difference could be the root cause—and also the different narratives in the mainstream media,” he said.

When Anne Barnard, a Times correspondent, asked him about extrajudicial detentions of peaceful demonstrators, Assad launched into a discourse about the administration of justice. “First of all, you have to be precise about these terms—what do you mean by ‘political prisoner’?” he asked. “You support the terrorists—it’s not a political prisoner. If you support the terrorists, you are supporting the killers.”

Last year, Amnesty International reported that Assad’s forces had “held thousands of detainees without trial, often in conditions that amounted to enforced disappearance.” When Barnard read a list of Syrian civilians who had been detained without charges, Assad suggested that, as the head of the executive branch, he could do very little for them. “We have institutions—we have a judicial system,” he said. “I don’t have any authority to do anything regarding anyone.” The detainees, he suggested, had all been convicted of crimes. “You have terrorists prevailing in many areas of Syria,” he said. “You have many people dealing with the terrorists—either [because] they are criminals or terrorists or because they need money. But, according to the law, they should go to prison.”

While much of the world sees the war as essentially a civil conflict—beginning in a series of popular demonstrations, and driven by Syrians with grievances against their government—Assad argues that it is largely being imposed by the United States and its allies, which are backing rebel groups. Officials in the Obama Administration have acknowledged that the U.S. has supported non-extremist rebel groups, such as the Free Syrian Army, in the Syrian conflict. But Assad insists that the U.S. is also supporting ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate. Obama has publicly pledged to “destroy” ISIS, and the U.S. military has been carrying out a bombing campaign against the organization for the past two years; American soldiers have died fighting ISIS in Iraq. Assad insisted that this was all theatre. “The whole argument that the United States wants to fight ISIS is not correct,” he said. “This is an illusion and misinformation. In reality, everything the United States has been doing in Syria, at least since what they call the international alliance against ISIS, is to expand ISIS.”

The Western aim in supporting such groups, Assad said, is to destroy his regime, because he has refused to accede to American demands. “The real reason is about toppling the government,” he said. “The government doesn’t fit with the criteria of the West or the United States,” he added, without specifying what those criteria were. “They want to change Syria, and we are not going to allow this.” As the guests stood to leave, Assad made it clear that he did not foresee leaving office anytime soon. “If you’re the captain of the ship, when you have a storm, you don’t jump in the water,” he said. “You lead it to shore.”