Regime versus Opposition

Syria is a country in utter upheaval, a massive ruination of a place. Millions of refugees have been created by a regime that refused to listen to an initial peaceful protest of its Sunni majority seeking equality within the country of their birth and heritage. President Bashar al-Assad signalled his contempt for those who had the unmitigated gall to complain by having Hamza al-Khatib, a teen, arrested at an antigovernment demonstration in 2011. He was seen again once his mutilated body was delivered back to his family.

There were many other unsubtle hints that the regime had no intention of bending an ear to its critics. To prove that his people "loved him", as he stated more than once in interviews over the brewing insurrection, he saw to it that Ali Farzat, a popular cartoonist was beaten, both hands broken after he compared the president to Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. Ibrahim Qashoush who wrote poetry and anti-Assad songs rallying the protesters was last seen with his throat cut, his body in the Orontes river.

"We lost our faith in the international community. We don't care about the Geneva conference and whether it takes place or not. We have lost a lot of relatives and friends and family members in the fighting, and we've lost Syria", said a former rebel fighter with an arm amputated, living in the squalid Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. He, like all those other tens of thousands in the sprawling refugee camps experienced bombs and gunfire ruining their once-normal and thriving cities, now destroyed.

A boy named Ahmed mourns his father, Abdulaziz Abu Ahmed Khrer, who was killed by a Syrian army sniper, during his funeral in Idlib, northern Syria, March 8, 2012. This image was one in a series of 20 by AP photographers that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

Where once the international community had an opportunity to intervene, to give immediate and practical assistance to the Syrian Free Army rebels and the Syrian Opposition that attempted to bring cohesion to the rebellion, hesitation gripped the situation and the opposition was left to its faltering devices. Creating the opportunity for Islamist jihadists to enter the country in a reverse expedition, where once Syria expedited jihadists into Iraq.

The entry of the Islamists served to validate President al-Assad's claim that all the rebellious militias were comprised of terrorists, while at the same time he must have exulted that their arrival would complicate matters for the Sunni Syrian insurgents who were waging a battle for parity with the Shia population. It wasn't long before reports of human rights abuses by the opposition materialized with beheadings, floggings, mass killings of prisoners.

It would be difficult to discern which is capable of greater vicious brutalities, the regime or its opponents. Perhaps the question has now been answered, with the revelation that 11,000 Syrians taken prisoner by the regime were deliberately starved, tortured and murdered, proof offered by a Syrian police photographer who took 55,000 photographs with him as he abandoned the regime in a spirit of horrified repugnance at its atrocities.

The regime has been guilty of a score of massacres; when its assault on Houla in 2012 killed 100, including many young children. Photographs of rows of dead children lined up in a mosque with gaping head wounds demonstrated the regime's care of its own. Rebels retaliated in pro-regime Latakia by killing nearly 200 civilians. Another 147 bodies discovered in Aleppo, courtesy of the military.

A Syrian man cries while holding the body of his son near Dar El Shifa hospital in Aleppo, Syria, Oct. 3, 2012. The boy was killed by the Syrian army. This image was one in a series of 20 by AP photographers that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo, File)

Warplanes indiscriminately targeted rebel-held residential areas with incendiary bombs and explosive-filled barrels, hitting bread lines at bakeries, aiming for schools and makeshift hospitals. Arbitrary arrests, detentions, enforced disappearances, torture at a network of detention facilities throughout Syria reflected the regime's agenda to terrorize its Sunni population. Last August a sarin nerve agent attack killed almost a thousand Syrian men, women and children in a night-time bombing.

So what can possibly result from a 'peace' meeting between the regime and opposition which unequivocally demands that Bashar al-Assad be removed from the governing role he inherited, and the man himself declaring there is no power on Earth that can possibly remove him from the presidency, is a conundrum that the great minds of Russia and the United States are free to mull over.