It might be the night before the election, but SBS has something rather different planned for prime time tonight.

It will air a world exclusive interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian President has overseen a five-year civil war in the country that has killed half a million people and displaced 10 million more. His tactics against rebels have been widely condemned. Malcolm Turnbull has called Assad a murderous tyrant, while Bill Shorten has called him a butcher.

Which begs the question: how did he come to give an exclusive interview to an Australian public broadcaster?

TV news reporter Luke Waters started working at SBS around the time the crisis started and visited refugee camps in Lebanon in 2013. “I was told by a source that the President was open to being interviewed by foreign media — so I first approached the consulate in Sydney,” he told Crikey from Lebanon this morning. “That approach was accompanied by approaches to the Syrian Ministry For Information and Press Offices. As I was never given an outright ‘no’ I sent follow-up emails on a semi-regular basis ever since.”

Assad hasn’t spoken to the media in some months, though for the length of the war, he has popped his head up a few times a year. His last interview was in April with Sputnik, an agency controlled by the Russian government which allowed him plenty of leeway to talk about his war on “terror” in Syria.

An interview with SBS is rather different to that. Waters says it’s difficult to say why Assad agreed. “Perhaps it was a combination of things — a series of annoying emails from an Australian journalist, the fact that we are a dedicated world news broadcaster (which they indicated was appealing) and perhaps even some luck plays into these things. My last email or letter may have come at the time they were considering another round of interviews and therefore my name and SBS was front-of-mind at the right time.”

The interview was held at the President’s Damascus offices. Waters describes it as looking more like a “grand old home” than an office complex, though he and producer Meggie Palmer had to do a pre-interview meeting with press officials at the more modern, imposing palace. It was at this pre-interview meeting that the logistics were nutted out — the time, location, and the like.

“The interview room furnished with just two chairs facing each other and the four cameras were set up ready to begin filming. Make-up was hastily applied and we got underway with a clock set up in my view. We were instructed that the interview was to run 25 minutes.

“There is so much to ask this man I found it difficult covering it all in the allotted time. There are many many more questions I planned to ask but the clock hit the 25-minute mark far too quickly!”

SBS’s interview with Bashar al-Assad airs at 7.30 tonight.