Syrian President Bashar Assad has been reelected to a fourth term as president of war-ravaged Syria with over 95% of the votes cast, results showed on Thursday. Munia Iffat reports.

·          Bashar Assad wins re-election for the fourth term and defeating two challengers, including a former senior official of a rebel coalition, Syrian authorities have announced.

·         According to Hammouda Sabbagh, turnout in Wednesday’s election was 78%, with Assad winning over 13 million votes.

·         Mahmoud Ahmad Marei, who previously served as the secretary-general of the rebel coalition National Front for the Liberation of Syria, received some 470,276 votes, or 3.1%, while Abdullah Sallum Abdullah of the Socialist Unionist Party came in third with about 213,968 votes or 1.5%.

·         The controversial vote extending Assad's stranglehold on power was the second since the start of a decade-long civil conflict that has killed more than 388,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure.

·         On the eve of the election, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy said the poll was "neither free nor fair", and Syria's fragmented opposition has called it a "farce".

But few believed that the 55-year-old Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, would be re-elected. In the last multi-candidate poll in 2014, Assad won 88 percent of the vote.