Damascus - A few days before the end of 2018, Syria, under the consolidated leadership of President Bashar Al Assad, the national army and allied forces, has faced challenges in defending sovereignty against a war imposed for almost eight years.

The reality, hidden and distorted from Western power circles and the backing of Middle Eastern nations, reveals that more than 90 percent of the national territory was liberated from extremist gangs.

Terrorist groups, with tenacity and the application of new combat tactics, were expelled from the southern part of the country, removed from the surroundings of the capital and forced to concentrate in the northern province of Idlib and to the east of the Euphrates River.

No other Arab nation, in the long history of the Middle East, has ever had to face the combined onslaught of the United States and its supporters, who still back some 50 extremist organizations.

Most Western and Arab embassies left Damascus in 2011 and set up an unparalleled trade and financial bloc which has caused losses of nearly 500 billion dollars to Syria.

The loss of more than 500,000 lives and the destruction of approximately two-thirds of the nation's infrastructure showed the hard way to defend independence.

Besides the perfidious and groundless interpretation of confessional bases, extremist organizations such as the Islamic State (Daesh) or the former Al-Nusra Front, burst into Syria to control oil and gas fields and mineral deposits.

The Syrian army, with the support of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, Russian aviation and other allied militias, gradually reconquered strategic areas in Homs, Aleppo, Deir Ezzor and Raqqa.

More than 1,400 towns and villages have been liberated to date, another 2,518 have joined the reconciliation process, and more than 1.5 million displaced people have returned to their homeland.

But challenges, largely overcome with constancy and combining negotiating policies and in favor of national and international reconciliation, are still present due to the double standards of the United States and its followers who defend the economic value of petrodollars at all costs.

The wisdom of Syria's enemies does not exist, it is manipulated through no less than 120 satellite broadcasting channels and allows the only terrorists' organized bastion to remain in Idlib or in a strip of 5 by 20 kilometers of the Daesh near Syria's northeastern border with Iraq.

Peace agreements are repeatedly sabotaged and hindered in Geneva, Switzerland; Astana, Kazakhstan, or Sochi, Russia, and extreme separatism of Kurdish forces north of Aleppo and in the northern Syrian province of Hasaka is encouraged.

The idea, then, is to ignore the current easing of tension with Iraq, Lebanon or Jordan and the interest of parliamentary political groups in the region and Europe in respect for and negotiation with Syria.

The path to peace, tolerance and reconciliation is still riddled with obstacles and the complexity of reality directly or indirectly involves the five permanent member nations of the United Nations Security Council.