Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview broadcast Sunday that he is not afraid of meeting the same fate as the deposed and disgraced leaders of Libya and Egypt, saying he has nothing in common with them.

In one of his rare interviews with Western media since the deadly uprising in Syria erupted last year, Assad brushed off a question about whether he feared for his family, including his wife and three children.

"It's a completely different situation," he told German broadcaster ARD. "What's happening in Egypt is different from what is happening in Syria.... You cannot compare," he said.

He also rejected any comparisons with Libya, where rebels helped by NATO air strikes toppled the regime. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was killed while fleeing advancing opposition fighters.

"Describing what happened to al Gadhafi, this is savage, this is crime," he said in the interview which was conducted in English.

The 16 months of upheaval in Syria, spurred by the Arab Spring's pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, have left well over 14,000 people dead, according to activists. They accuse the autocratic ruler of crushing legitimate protests seeking reforms by waging a war against his own people.

Blames U.S. for civilian deaths

But in the interview, the 46-year-old Assad who has ruled Syria since taking over from his father in 2000, accused the U.S. of fueling the uprising, saying that Washington ultimately bears responsibility for the deaths of innocent civilians in the Middle Eastern country.

The U.S. is partnering with those "terrorists... with weapons, money or public and political support at the United Nations," Assad said. "They offer the umbrella and political support to those gangs to... destabilize Syria."

Assad rejected responsibility of his security forces for the violence, claiming that "supporters of the government, the victims from the security and the army" far outnumber those among civilians.

Instead, he told ARD that an opposition made up of terrorists, gangs, "a mixture, an amalgam of al-Qaeda [and] other extremists" is responsible for the violence.

When asked directly about the killing of more than 100 civilians in the Syrian village of Houla in May, he blamed it on gangs who "came in hundreds from outside the city."

The massacre caused an international outcry, and UN investigators have since concluded that Syrian government troops could be behind the killings.

Assad said a "majority of the people ask for reforms, political reforms [but] not freedom." He stressed that he still had the overall support of Syria's people, firmly ruling out stepping down.

"The president shouldn't run away from challenge and we have a national challenge now in Syria," he said.

UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan arrives at a hotel in Damascus on Sunday, a day after admitting that his peace plan had so far failed to end 16 months of bloodshed. (Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters)While he said he was ready for political dialogue with the opposition, Assad left no doubt that he would fight those his government perceives as terrorists.

"But as long as you have terrorism and as long as the dialogue didn't work, you have to fight the terrorism. You cannot keep just making dialogue while they are killing your people and your army," he said.

The main obstacles to a peaceful solution to the conflict are the countries supporting the opposition, namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who send armaments; Turkey, which helps with logistics and smuggling across the border; and, finally, U.S. political support, Assad said.

The interview, the third Assad has given to a Western news organization since last year, was conducted Thursday in a government guest house in Damascus and recorded by Syria's state television, according to ARD.

The interview for ARD's foreign policy program Weltspiegel was conducted by Juergen Todenhoefer, a former media executive and legislator for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union party. He has published a number of books and essays on Islam, the crusade against terrorists in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, and on Iraq and Afghanistan.

UN special envoy Kofi Annan, who is the architect of an international plan to end the crisis, acknowledged in an interview published Saturday that the international community's efforts to find a political solution to the escalating violence in Syria have failed. Annan arrived in the Syrian capital Sunday for talks with Assad, his spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said.