A still image taken from video shows Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaking as he is sworn in for a new seven-year term at the presidential palace in Damascus, yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Bashar al-Assad was sworn in for a new term as Syria’s President yesterday, after an election which his opponents dismiss as a sham but which he said proved he had achieved victory after a “dirty war” to unseat him.

Once written off in the West as certain to fall, he launches his seven-year term in his securest position since the early days of the three-year-old war.

Those close to Damascus say he now believes his Western and regional foes will be forced to deal with him as a bulwark against Sunni Islamist militants who advanced across northern Iraq last month.

At his inauguration he delivered a defiant speech, vowing to recover all Syria from Islamist insurgents and warning that Western and Arab countries would pay dearly for supporting rebels he described as terrorists.

Looking calm and confident, the president of 14 years repeatedly took aim at the West and Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab monarchies who have funded and armed the rebels that have taken control of much of the north and east of his country.

This is completely separated from reality

“Soon we will see the Arab, regional and Western states that supported terrorism pay a high price,” he said in the speech at the presidential palace in Damascus, broadcast on state TV.

“I repeat my call today to those who were misled to put down their guns, because we will not stop fighting terrorism and striking it wherever it is until we restore security to every spot of Syria,” Assad said.

But with swathes of the country still in rebel hands, opponents said the speech showed Assad was delusional.

“This is completely separated from reality. Assad is going on as if everything is normal and as if he didn’t lose two-thirds of the country,” Monzer Akbik of the Western-backed National Coalition opposition group told Reuters. “It was a theatrical election and this is a theatrical swearing in.”

Syria’s war has been the battleground for a sectarian struggle between groups supported by Sunni Muslim states including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Assad’s government backed by Shi’ite Iran.

Last month it spread dramatically in Iraq, where an al-Qaeda offshoot operating on both sides of the frontier, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), seized cities, changed its name to the Islamic State and declared its leader ruler of all Muslims.

ISIL has been rejected as a terrorist group by the Gulf states that support other Sunni fighters in Syria but Damascus, Baghdad and Teh­ran all blame the Gulf kingdoms for supporting the wider Sunni militancy that feeds it.