Did Bashar Assad’s 11-Year-Old Son Taunt the US Military?

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SANA / AFP / Getty Images

Syrian President Bashar Assad does an interview with Russian newspaper "Izvestia" in Damascus on Aug. 26, 2013

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s 11-year-old son Hafez is not afraid of a potential military strike on Syria—if you are to believe a Facebook post from what appears to be his account, according to the New York Times’s Liam Stack.

“I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make this huge mistake of beginning something that they don’t know the end of it,” reads the post, which appears to have been taken down along with the account.

Information on the account lined up with known facts about Hafez—including his schooling at the Montessori School in Damascus—and the list of people that “liked” or commented on the post revealed names of members of Assad’s inner circle, Stack writes after some digging. “If the Facebook post attributed to Mr. Assad’s son is a hoax, it is either a highly elaborate one involving dozens of fake accounts purporting to belong to the children of other regime insiders, or a forgery so impressive that some of those children themselves — including the boy’s cousins — have been fooled.

Writes the Facebook post’s allegedly 11-year-old author: “No one has soldiers like the ones we do in Syria … America doesn’t have soldiers, what it has is some cowards with new technology who claim themselves liberators.”

[New York Times]