Iran's Shattered "Axis of Resistance"

"The Syrian debate is happening at all levels of Society."

"People are asking: Why did we spent so much money there? What did we achieve?"

"What is our justification now that it's all gone?" 

Hassan Shemshadi, Iranian analyst

AP Photo

 

Iranians appear to be awakening from their stupor of victimization by their theocratic regime; influential critics in the country now speaking out publicly of the futility and regional destabilization fomented by the Islamic Republic of Iran, short-changing the great Iranian people living in poverty and repression crushed beneath the fist of the Islamist Khomeinist regime under Ruhollah Khomeini's successor Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, carrying on the vision of his predecessor.

The sudden collapse of the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad, propped up by Tehran, has taken the Iranian Mullahs and their Republican Guard Corps by surprise; no longer can they rely on Syria as a conduit for weapons meant for the terror groups founded and funded by Iran and others dependent on its support; Tehran's infamous 'axis of resistance'. 

The public has always grumbled in fruitless frustration over billions spent by their government to recruit, train and arm their proxy militias, while depriving the people of Iran of basic necessities of life. That, and the Iranian lives sacrificed to help support the Syrian regime in its long-standing civil war against Syria's Sunni population, and its and conflict with foreign Sunni-led Islamist groups like the Islamic State; all to naught. 

 

AP Photo

 

"No one will be able to waste Iran's dollars for maintaining a spider web anymore", stated former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh in a social media post, urging Iranians to celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad. A professor of international relations at Tehran University, Ebrahim Motaghi stated that Iran had been reduced from regional power to merely another country, on a talk show viewed widely.

The Iranian regime's strategy to become a dominant regional force capable of confronting Israel and the United States, its support of militant Islamist groups across the Middle East it named the axis of resistance, is being questioned not only by an incensed public, but also by well-placed authority figures. Mohammad Shariati Dehghan, former Iranian representative to the intergovernmental Organization of Islamic Cooperation wrote in a front-page opinion piece that the Assad defeat exposed Iran's strategy as misguided, "built on weak foundations".

A new approach was required, to prioritize building alliances with other countries rather than propping up militant groups, while redirecting funding and resources back to the people of Iran. This open public debate is a departure from the norm since for many years leaders of Iran placed support for Syria and allied terrorist groups fighting Israel to be a non-negotiable focus of the Islamic revolution, which national security demanded.

These open comments, infuriating to Ayatollah Khamenei, were, he said, "a crime", having the effect of sowing fear and uncertainty in the public mind. Iran's judiciary responded by announcing a criminal investigation into specific prominent figures and news outlets identified as leading the criticism. Among them, former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahtpisheh who had revealed the Syrian debt to Iran came to $30 billion.

Syria had become Iran's central command base in the region for over 40 years. Military bases, missile factories, tunnels and warehouses were all controlled by Iran. Weapons, cash and logistical support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists in the West Bank and Iraq were all beneficiaries of Tehran's largess in building its 'axis of resistance'. 

When the Assad regime was deposed, Syrians stormed the Damascus Iranian Embassy, smashing photographs of Iranian leaders, and hauling down the Iranian flag. The Islamist rebel leader, Ahmed al-Shara, who spearheaded the insurgents, warned Iran he would not tolerate continued Iranian interference in Syria's affairs. Gone forever, the Assad regime's complicity with the Republic.

AP Photo

"Why were you spending billions of dollars of oil revenues that belong to the Iranian people on Assad until the very end if he wasn't even listening to you?"

"At least on the topic of Syria, stop lying and be honest with the people."

Alireza Mokarami, Iranian, Syrian civil war veteran

Islamist Terrorists as Liberators

"Anxiety about being thrown in one of Assad's notorious prisons created wide mistrust among Syrians."

"Assad nurtured this culture of fear to maintain control and crush political opposition."

Lina Khatib, associate fellow, Middle East and North Africa division, Chatham House 

"This happiness will not be completed until I can see my son out of prison and know where he is."

"I have been searching for him for two hours. He has been detained for 13 years."

"They took away so many of us. They [the Assad government] burned our hearts."

Bassam Masri, Damascus, Syria

A man holding nooses for hanging prisoners   AP 

To the world's astonishment and that of experts in the military and uprisings, it took a mere ten days for a coalition of Islamist terrorist groups calling themselves liberators to remove a murderous despot from power in Syria where Bashar al-Assad's family had ruled for over half a century, as an Alawite-Shiite minority governing a majority Sunni population. A populist uprising that began 13 years ago in protest against unequal sectarian treatment saw Assad respond with bombs and bullets and a full-scale insurgency resulted.

Assad fought the insurgents with chemical weapons and barrel bombs, and when it appeared as though his regime was weakening and the insurgents were gaining the upper hand, help came in the guise of Iran's IRGC and its proxy militia Hezbollah. When that wasn't enough to turn the tide, Vladimir Putin stepped in with his warplanes to lead the aerial assault bombing schools, markets and hospitals in the Sunni-majority areas of the country in exchange for a deep sea Mediterranean port and an airbase in Syria.

 

People stand outside the infamous Saydnaya military prison waiting to see their loved ones freed.  AP

 

With the taking of Syria's major cities and finally Damascus, as the Syrian military backed down and backed off, overwhelmed by the insurgent Islamist Sunni forces, they claimed to be regrouping outside the cities, their withdrawal from conflict deliberately planned to avoid civilian deaths (this, from a military sufficiently loyal to Assad to help him slaughter close to a half-million civilians throughout the civil war), the insurgents broke into prisons and the regime's security facilities, freeing political prisoners and the tens of thousands who disappeared throughout the duration of the conflict.

Videos began appearing on social media of prisoners racing about in celebration after their release; some barefoot, others  wearing scant clothing, shouting in an ecstasy of feeling liberated, on the discovery that the government of Bashar al-Assad had fallen. And little wonder, given their decade of incarceration in prisons where torture was systematic and where secret executions took place at over two dozen facilities operated by Syrian intelligence.

 

A man breaks the lock of a cell in Saydnaya military prison   AP

 

A Syrian military defector ("Caesar") smuggled out over 53,000 photographs in 2013 showing clear evidence of rampant torture, as well as disease and starvation, critical components of Syria's prison system. The common knowledge of the fearful security apparatus and the prison torture both isolated opponents of the regime, and instilled fear in the population. The Saydnaya military prison (the 'human slaughterhouse') saw women detainees, some housed there with their children, screaming in fear as men broke through their cell doors.

Human rights groups bore testimony that dozens of prisoners were executed weekly in this prison; the estimate being that  up to 13,000 Syrians had been killed there, between 2011 and 2016 alone. "Don't be afraid ... Bashar Assad has fallen! Why are you afraid?! one of the rebels asked as he guided streams of women out of their packed, tiny cells. Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Damascus saw prisoners freed over the past ten days. Families of detainees and the disappeared waited outside prisons hoping to see their loved ones evacuate.

Associated Press

Marking the End of Assad's Rule in Syria

"As his military failed to hold Aleppo and then Hama, Assad issued an order raising soldiers' salary by 50% - but that in itself is unlikely to turn the tide."

"Russian planes backed up Syrian forces in Hama, but clearly not strongly enough to make an impact.

The lack of all out Russian military support has fuelled speculation that Moscow may be less able to play the game changing role that it performed in Syria in 2015. That would be down to almost three years of war in Ukraine, draining its reserves of manpower and military hardware."

"But Russia still has compelling reasons to stay the course with Assad. President Putin's decisive, full-scale military intervention, which kept the Syrian leader in power when he was close to defeat, showed up the failure of Western allies - the US in particular - to honour their promises of support to the rebels."

BBC

Rebel fighters hold weapons in front of the Hama governor's building on Dec. 5 after Syrian rebels captured the city during their advance across northern Syria. (Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters)

On Thursday, Syrian insurgents entered Hama following days of intense clashes with government forces. The Syrian army contended its withdrawal from Hama after insurgents broke its defences was merely a tactic on their part to protect the civilian population. But it's clear that the weeklong offensive has bought large parts of Syria firmly under the insurgents' control.

 

Hama, Syria's fourth largest city, saw the Syrian army 'redeployed' taking positions outside the city, ostensibly to protect civilian lives. In all likelihood the next target for the insurgents will be the central city of Homs, the third largest in Syria, about 40 kilometres south of Hama. Homs is the gateway to Damascus, Assad's capital seat of power and control of the coastal region where he has his support base of Alawite Syrians.

 

The de facto chief of the Syrian insurgency, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, announced through a video message that the insurgency has taken the city of Hama in a "conquering that is not vengeful, but one of mercy and compassion". Somewhat like the sanctimonious statements of the Taliban when they took Kabul, attempting to reassure the international community that they had changed since the Western occupation of 2001; they were kinder and gentler, and would welcome international investors. As they went about their death-search for Western collaborators and supporters of the West-backed government.

Al-Golani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al0-Sham, one of al-Qaeda's branches in Syria, is considered a terrorist group and with good reason. Following three days of fighting with government forces on the outskirts of the city, the Syrian insurgents took Hama. After 'resisting' the insurgents for days, the Syrian military stated that a number of troops were killed, accusing the attackers of relying on suicide attacks to break through the city's defences. 

 

A charge that will certainly fail to embarrass and humiliate the insurgents whose methods are no different from that of the Islamic State, and who doubtless treated the statement with the jeering humour it deserved.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in Britain, explained that after fierce battles within Hama, opposition gunmen took control of police command headquarters as well as the airbase and central prison. Hundreds of prison detainees were free to leave. "If Hama falls, it means that the beginning of the regime's fall has started" Rami Abdurrahman, the Observatory's chief, stated, prior to the city's capture. 

An umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army, appears to be fighting alongside the jihadi group HTS in the offensive. The conflict which began with a popular uprising in March of 2011 has been reignited after recent years of stagnation. Hama's fall to the Islamist group of terrorists without doubt features the end of Bashar al-Assad's rule following the stunning capture of Aleppo.

 

Syrian Islamist rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani speaks at an unknown location in this still image from 2016 file video obtained on Dec. 5, 2024. (Orient TV/Reuters )

 

"The HTS leader known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, issued a message to the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, pledging that the fighting in Syria “will not spill over into Iraq”, and urging al-Sudani’s government to “distance itself from the situation in Syria”."

"Speaking to CNN, al-Jolani said the insurgents’ aim remains to topple the Assad regime in Damascus.

“When we talk about objectives, the goal of the revolution remains the overthrow of this regime. It is our right to use all available means to achieve that goal,” he said."

The Guardian

Syrian Surprise Assault --Turkish Game of Regime Change

"Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, part of an alliance of terrorist groups active in Syria and with links to the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda, was formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, and served as Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. The organization is a jihadist group that upholds Sharia law, occupies Syria's Idlib area and cooperates with the Turkish military and Turkish-backed groups in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was also involved in HTS's formation."

"Turkey is unleashing another gruesome jihad in Syria. The city of Aleppo is now effectively under the control of Turkish-backed jihadist groups. Tens of thousands of Christians, Kurds and other minorities are in danger of extermination. Videos of jihadists abducting Kurdish women have also surfaced on social media."

Uzay Bulut, Gatestone

"MISSING FROM MEDIA REPORTS ON ALEPPO: 'Rebels' taking city are NOT Freedom Fighters but Turkish-backed Islamists with same ideology as ISIS that target Yazidis, Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities.

"The USCIRF reports they 'target religious minorities, especially Yazidis, for rape, assassination, kidnapping for ransom, confiscation of property, and desecration of cemeteries and places of worship.'

USCIRF Factsheet says Hay's Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) 'remains a potent source of a Salafi-jihadism that restricts the religious freedom of non-conforming Sunni Muslims and threatens the property, safety, and existence of religious minority groups such as Alawites, Christians, and Druze.' They also report 'torture, forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and killing in detention.'

"Expect the same horrific crimes from these Turkish-backed Islamist militias (including HTS) that we have seen from them in other parts of Syria. They learned from the international response to ISIS to not make an immediate public display of this violence.

".... [A]reas under government control are also horrible as they endure 'egregious human rights abuses such as arbitrary detention and torture, enforced disappearance.'                Nadine Maenza, the Former Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)

 Pictured: Turkish-backed jihadists patrol in central Aleppo on November 30, 2024. (Photo by Muhammad Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Syria's 13-year-old uncivil war that witnessed an estimated half-million deaths assigned to the country's regime under President Bashar al-Assad spurred by Sunni Syrians demanding equal treatment to the minority Alawite Shiites represented by Assad, ignited a destructive response from the Syrian military that turned a protest into a civil war. It did not take long for the country to be flooded with the presence of Sunni terrorist groups eager to contest the Syrian military in an exchange of tribal/secular conflict.

Now, a complex patchwork of terrorist fighters whose focus is on opposing a number of various enemies have converged to challenge the regime once again. A lightning assault last week against government forces in the northwest of the country is in the process of altering the front lines in the conflict. The Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist salafist group poses a formidable challenge to the Assad regime. It is predicted by Middle East experts that this current and growing conflict has the potential to go beyond the country itself.

 

Syrian opposition fighters ride on a truck in Khan Sheikhoun, south-west of Aleppo. Photograph: Ghaith Alsayed/AP

The United States has distanced itself from the offensive, while Russia and Iran, both involved in giving dedicated support over the years of conflict to Syria, both distracted at present by their own disparate conflicts -- as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon -- may yet be drawn more into the Syria defensive. The HTS group, over a period of a decade was involved in disabling the Syrian government in its bid to establish Islamic rule in Syria as the successor to al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, now on the  ascendancy.

It has in the last few years, attempted to soften its harsh image of Islamist intolerance, claiming recently it will protect Aleppo's cultural and religious sites, including churches. Troops loyal to Assad have to this point managed to fend off efforts to topple his regime, since 2011. Assad's forces back then with its violent crackdowns on protests moved the situation from protest to full volume rebellion. Opposition rebels had until recently been contained within part of north-western Syria with the help of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah.

Suddenly, government forces seem to have abandoned their upper hand in the face of growing resistance from opposition rebels, wresting control of Aleppo, although the military claimed it was redeploying troops from areas controlled in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, aided by joint Syrian-Russian air force bombardments. Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security adviser, spoke of the rebels' advance in connection with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, weakened through conflicts elsewhere.

According to Turkey's state-operated Anadolu Agency, the Syrian National Army -- a loose coalition of Turkish-backed forces -- took part in the recent rebel offensive. The SNA in joining the latest fighting did so primarily against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria who have in the past fought Assad's government, as well as HTS and Islamic State Islamists. Turkey's goal is its fight against Syrian Kurdish fighters considered by Turkey to be terrorists for their links to the  Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which launches attacks against Turkey for Kurdish independence.

Aleppo, Economist Intelligence

 

A Country That Was Once Syria and the Agony of Its People

(Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)  "More humanitarian access is needed,. Intensified cross-line and cross-border deliveries are essential to reach everyone in need everywhere."

"If Bashar al-Assad wins or survives in ways that give him control over most of Syria, Iran will have a massive new degree of influence over Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in a polarized Middle East divided between Sunni and Shi'ite and steadily driving minorities into exile."

Anthony Cordesman, (2013) military and national security analyst, Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

"Bashar was never going to accept anything short of a total restoration of the 'wall of terror' built by this father in the 1970s and 1980s."

"No peace negotiations or reconciliation processes will ever change this reality, which has been built on fear and enforced with sectarian weapons."

Mustafa Khalifa, Syrian intellectual

 

"I would never (forget). When I left Syria, I had one of those rubber bands that you wear on your wrist. I had the Syrian flag on my hand. I swore that I will never take it off until I actually get my Canadian citizenship."

"Every day I look at it, it reminds me of what I've been through and what I've become right now."

"The big misconception is people calling it war. I guess it's war now, but it wasn't war when it started. It was a revolution against the dictatorship regime."

Mohammad Al Masalma, owner Mosy Photography, Syrian refugee, Halifax

A father reacts in 2013 after the death of two of his children, whom activists said were killed by shelling from forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, at alAnsari area in Aleppo.

Syrian Sunnis felt they had good reason to mount protests against their status as citizens of Syria ruled by a Shi'ite Alawite minority regime that ignored the human rights of the majority Sunni population. Their president felt they had no right to protest anything. He called them terrorists. He warned the world community that if the protests which turned into armed rebellion after the Syrian military arrested, tortured and murdered children and adults alike for presuming to protest their living conditions and human rights, would impact the entire Middle East. 

 

What started as a peaceful protest became a searing, no-holds-barred civil war.

Sectarian hatred, tribalism, ethnic loyalties have always divided the Middle East. In Syria those divisions became a symbol of just how gruesome atrocities can become as commonplace instances of rancor and rage as the conflict began to attract the attention of seasoned Islamist jihadists from other dangerous conflicts like Libya arriving in Syria to further season the simmering pot of lethal antipathies. Syrian Sunnis whether or not they became part of the rebellion, became victims in a war of attrition, targeted by their president as connivers with the rebels intent on bringing down the regime.

It took no time at all before terrified Sunnis were forced to vacate their homes, their farms, their businesses, and towns seeking to escape being strafed and bombed by military aircraft. Hospitals, clinics, schools, apartment buildings were being indiscriminately bombed as long as they were in Sunni-majority areas. Heritage UNESCO areas of ancient antiquity weren't spared. Soon a new scourge entered the ravaged areas calling itself a new caliphate and threatening Christians, Yazidis and Kurds with death as infidels. 

 

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's publicized atrocities horrified the world.

 

A doctor talks with refugees at a displaced persons camp in Atme in Syria's northwestern Idlib province near the border with Turkey, March 14, 2020

 

But it was the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad that was responsible for slaughtering a half-million of its own citizens, of creating six million displaced Syrians living in squalid camps within Syria, and another six million swelling refugee camps in Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon. Europe and North America became the destination of Syrian refugees hoping to secure a future for their families. It has been a decade since the first demonstration turned into an uprising on March 15, 2011.

Then the Assad regime began to put down a rebellion of 'terrorists', turning to barrel bombs for greater effect in bombing innocent civilians and rebel groups alike. This has been as much Iran's war as it has been Syria's. Assad wants his authority reestablished throughout the country that was once Syria, and Iran plans to be the power behind the throne, as its rightful destiny. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights counts 560,000 dead, while the Syrian Network for Human Rights places that figure 100,000 greater taking account of the Syrians brought to Assad's dungeons and never seen again.

 

Syrian amputee in refugee camp, with his children  (Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters)

 

With Tehran and Moscow at  his side, Bashar al-Assad prevailed. The Peshmerga in Kurdistan made it their mission to destroy ISIL's power base and threat to defenceless communities, even as Turkey as the neighbour sheltering more Syrians than any other, violates the Syrian border with the intention of rooting out a Kurdish presence in collaboration with the anti-Turkey Turkish Kurdish PKK. The awkward collaboration between Moscow and Ankara in defiance of a U.S. presence failed to relieve the agony of Syrians.

 

Syrian farmer, walks with his grandchildren, at an internally displaced camp in northern Idlib, Syria on March 11, 2021. (Reuters)

Any censuring initiatives arising in the United Nations is foiled by Russia which has gained a deep-water seaport and an airbase in Syria for its invaluable assistance in bombing Syrian Sunnis. The U.S. under the Obama administration challenged Assad to avoid using proscribed weapons against his people, that would be a 'red line' that could never be tolerated. The sarin gas attack in 2013 in Ghouta killed up to 1,729 Syrians of all ages. A trifling inconvenience that required no response from the U.S.

With that level of assent-by-unresponsiveness, there was nothing that would stop Assad from continued use of poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction and he now has over 300 chemical attacks under his belt, along with Russian protection of his regime. But of course the Obama administration could do little because to intervene in Syria would mean encountering the Russian air-defence system at Assad's disposal. Except the Russian anti-aircraft batteries appear to be unused, along with the Chinese low-altitude radar system.

The reality appears to be that only Israel has committed to deterring the best-laid plans of the Islamic Republic of Iran in its takeover of Syria and placement of Hezbollah at Syria's ostensible disposal. The Israeli Air Force carries out myriad bombing attacks on Hezbollah targets in Syria. The Israeli Air Force is well on its way to destroying a good proportion of Syria's air defences. And still maintains diplomatic relations with Moscow. 

 

The mass butcher of his own civilians remains beyond accountability for the atrocities he has committed against his country and its people. Aided and abetted by Russia and by Iran there appears no appetite from within the international community to demand justice for those who lost their human rights along with their disposable lives.

 

An explosion is seen following Russian airstrikes on the village of al-Bara in the southern part of Syria's northwestern Idlib province, March 5, 2020.   AFP

How Soon Forgotten! Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes by subjecting cities to unlawful sieges that gave civilians no choice but to give up or die.

"[The] ICC has not opened an investigation in relation to Syria."

"Syria is not a state party to the Rome Statute and has not accepted the ICC [International Criminal Court] jurisdiction."

"Thus, crimes committed by its citizens on its own territories do not fall under the ICC jurisdiction, unless the [United Nations Security Council] would refer the situation to the ICC, which has not happened to date."

ICC spokesperson, Fadi el-Abdallah 

"The most heinous of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law perpetrated against the civilian population in Syria since March 2011."

"Such acts are likely to constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes and other international crimes, including genocide."

Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic report

"This matter has not been referred to the ICC, despite the several calls by the commission of inquiry, and numerous recommendations by the Human Rights council for the UN Security council to do so."

"[The Commission is exploring other] areas of criminal justice] to address the matter of Syrian war crimes]."

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

"There were rivers of blood and maggots [exuding from the bodies], once, I couldn’t eat anything for days."

"[Some corpses were totally rotten and their faces] unrecognizable [as if they had been deliberately disfigured with a chemical. It is the stench of the rotting corpses that most disturbed him and continues to date.] The smell stayed in my nose, even after I showered at home."

Syrian undertaker,witness Z 30/07/19

 

"Someone gives evidence that mass graves were still being dug until at least 2017. This is the kind of government, the kind of regime, that you don’t establish relations with."

"[The revelations made in such testimonies and the evidence laid out] will facilitate future trials against regime officials if they were caught traveling to Europe."

"The individual acts of torture only constitute a crime against humanity if they are being committed within a specific context, that being a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population. Z’s testimony establishes the crimes were systematic."

Patrick Kroker, senior legal advisor on Syria, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

Millions of Syrians have been displaced in a decade of fighting    Getty Images

Syrian war planes strafing civilian Sunni Syrians in bread lines, hospitals and medical clinics bombed, barrel bombs targeting Sunni Syrian neighbourhoods, Syrian towns suffering the agonies of prohibited gas attacks. Children arrested, tortured, murdered. Women raped, imprisoned, murdered. Syrian citizens disappeared, never to be seen again alive or dead. Millions of Syrians internally displaced, fleeing bombardment. Millions more becoming  refugees, flooding neighbouring countries for haven, migrating desperately toward Europe.

Most leaders of countries conceive of legacy projects through which their administrations and their names will be respected and held in gratitude by their public. But not necessarily those in the Middle East, and certainly not the Assad family dynasty with their Alawite tribal affiliations and deadly sectarian hatred; a regime well known to have committed atrocities against its own people in the past and committed to carrying on that tradition. Syria and Iraq, both politically Baathist from opposite ends of the spectrum, both preying on their majority population, Sunni and Shia respectively.

The world watched, transfixed with revulsion at television screens, seeing children in agony from chlorine gas bombs hitting their night-time villages courtesy of their president, Bashar al-Assad, whose military was dispatched to clear Syria of the presence of Sunni Muslim 'terrorists', Syrian civilians who had agitated for equal status and treatment with their Alawite Syrian counterparts. They were rewarded by barrel bombs that wrenched their limbs from their torsos; a regime solution for terrorist activity.

Blood covers the hands of an injured boy following airstrikes believed to have been carried out by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, February 2015.   (Mohammed Badra/REUTERS)

An estimated 350,000 to 500,000 Syrian civilians were slaughtered by their own government, innocent civilians whom their president characterized as terrorists to justify his lethal responses to their pleas for equality as Syrian citizens. The bloody war against Sunni Muslim Syrians created 11 million refugees. A few years in to the civil war that proceeded, the regime battling Syrian Sunni militias attempting to overthrow the government that had systematically destroyed their human rights; the instability attracting actual terrorist groups seeing opportunities to advance their own agendas, among them the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

ISIL terrorists brought horror to the minds of those looking in at the Middle East, with their expanding capture of territory in Iraq and Syria, and their delight in torturing and murdering captured Europeans and Americans alongside their preoccupation with terrorizing and murdering and enslaving Yazidis, and their threats against Christians. Yet despite the terror they inspired in persuading those loyal to ISIL living abroad to launch attacks against Westerners in Europe and the United States, Islamic State could never match the kill rate of an established government that excelled in war crimes against civilians.

When "60 Minutes" documented the extent of the Assad regime's war crimes, activist Mouar Moustafa was the featured personality, a man who was determined to bring the full extent of the blighted criminality of al-Assad to public view through revealing his cache of documents signed by Assad authorizing depraved mass murder alongside thousands of photographs of civilians tortured to death in an accountability mission against his former president.

With the help of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the participation of Iran's proxy terror group Hezbollah and an assortment of Iran-controlled Shi'ite militias, augmented by the aerial bombardments of Russian warplanes, al-Assad finally had the upper hand, and with the dissolution of the Islamic State 'caliphate' the Syrian regime was enabled to restore its territory, mopping up the remainder of the Syrian resistance. The dreadful crimes committed by the Assad regime against its own people cries out for justice. Logically that should come with a trial against Assad himself and his advisers and military commanders.

But the International Criminal Court is disinterested in opening an investigation of Syria, just as the United Nations General Assembly has little interest in holding Syria to account for its paroxysms of mass murder, and the Security Council was never able to launch a condemnation of the regime with two of its permanent members, China and Russia, refusing to give assent. Finally, an accounting of sorts has arisen with a court in Germany having prosecuted and convicted a former Syrian regime officer for crimes against humanity.

 

A court in the German city of Koblenz sentenced former intelligence officer Eyad al-Gharib, 44, to four-and-a-half years in prison for aiding crimes against humanity. Convicted of accompanying 30 detained demonstrators being transported to prison, while fully aware of the systematic torture that awaited them in the prison. al-Gharib, a junior officer, had been arrested in 2019 along with senior regime officer Col.Anwar Raslan, under the principle of universal jurisdiction whereby a national court jurisdiction is given authority in issues of grave crimes against international law, irrespective of where the crimes take place.

Presiding judge Anne Kerber stands before pronouncing her verdict in the court in Koblenz, Germany, on February 24.

While it's a start on seeking justice, much, much more must be accomplished. Justice will only be served when Bashar al-Assad faces the full extent of international law and faces a penalty commensurate with his unspeakable crimes, and along with him, other members of his administration and the Syrian military which destroyed so many lives. President Vladimir Putin also has much to answer for in establishing support for the Syrian regime enabling it with that support to regain Syria while helping to slaughter Syrian civilians in the process.

There is no question the world is weary of these totalitarian governments persecuting innocent people, destroying countless lives, producing innumerable refugees and displaced populations facing miserable living conditions in lives of  traumatized horror. It is just so much easier to feel the horror, dread the outcomes, wish it would all go away, and turn away from it all, if only to maintain one's own sanity, sense of proportion and comfort in living normal lives in countries that sustain the rule of law and security and equality for all.

"This is a historic verdict. Not only because it is the first to convict a Syrian regime official for crimes against humanity, but also because it recognizes his crimes were part of a widespread and systematic attack orchestrated by the highest bodies of Assad's regime."

"This is only the first of many other trials and investigations we are supporting. It is almost ten years since the crimes Eyad A. [al-Gharib] was convicted for were committed in those early days of the uprising as the regime cracked down on bare-armed protesters." 

Nerma Jelacic, director, Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)

O Canada! True Patriot Love

"The other day I had the honour to meet and listen to the honourable P.M. Justin Trudeau discussing the domestic and international policies of his government as well as his views and style of leading his caucus."
"With his government winning the next and upcoming federal election we have hopes to see Canada playing a bigger role in world peace."
Wasseem Ramli, honourary Syrian consul, Montreal 

"Shocked by the comments made to the press by the Syrian Honorary Consul in Montreal and the views he has espoused publicly on social media and elsewhere."
"Neither my team nor I were aware that officials at Global Affairs Canada had approved this appointment. I have asked the department to look into this right away."
"Let me be very clear that in my view, the current situation is unacceptable and we intend to respond very quickly. I think it's important to act with speed, but not with haste. And it's important to hear out the public service."
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland

A photo of Waseem and Trudeau posted to Waseem’s Facebook page. (wramli/Facebook)

"I think it's outrageous. She [Chrystia Freeland] needs to do more than just a review. This individual should never have been appointed in the first place."
"Again we see people who hold extreme views, who make anti-Semitic comments and who sympathize with terrorists seem to feel welcome in the Liberal Party of Canada."
Leader of the Conservative Parliamentary Opposition Andrew Scheer

"I'm baffled that it wouldn't have gone up [red flags within the Department of Foreign Affairs]."
"I would have assumed somebody in the chain of command would have said: 'Hey guys, bugger off, we're not going to do that'. Or: 'Let's wait until we bring it to the minister'."
"I'm somewhat surprised nobody at the political level seems to have known."
Former Canadian Ambassador to Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Ferry de Kerckhove

Chrystia Freeland ✔ @cafreeland

 · Sep 23, 2019

1/2 Shocked by the comments made to the press by the Syrian Honorary Consul in Montreal and the views he has espoused publicly on social media and elsewhere.

Chrystia Freeland ✔ @cafreeland

2/2 Neither my team nor I were aware that officials at Global Affairs Canada had approved this appointment. I have asked the Department to look into this right away.

In a world bursting with refugees, millions of them resulting from a civil war in Syria where the ruling Shiite-Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad has violated all human morals by employing the most atrocious means of delivering death to his majority-Sunni Syrian citizens, that ruined country has emptied its cities by millions of desperate-to-survive Syrians fleeing a hopeless situation, seeking refuge in bordering Islamic countries and migrating as refugees from a vicious, ongoing war to Europe and North America.

Every moral convention of warfare and civilian life in Syria was obliterated in President Bashar's no-holds-barred war against his Sunni Syrian population among whom orderly protests against their inferior status had emerged in 2011 only to be confronted by a vicious backlash from the regime. Since then, tens of thousands of Syrian Sunnis, among them children, have been imprisoned, tortured and murdered. Treaty-forbidden chemical weapons were used in bombing civilian enclaves. Markets, funerals, schools and hospitals and medical clinics have been deliberately bombed by the regime's forces.

Wartime munitions not only levelled municipal infrastructure and historical monuments along with people's homes, apartments, but barrel bombs were used indiscriminately to kill and to maim thousands of civilians. The death toll during the Syrian civil war between the regime and the resulting Sunni militias rose over a half-million until no one counted any longer. Of the pre-war population of 22-million people, an estimated 13 million have fled their homes, some internally displaced, an equal number external refugees.

The Syrian regime, aided and abetted in its relentless murder spree by the Islamic Republic of Iran dispatching al-Qods units of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its proxy terrorist militia Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Shiite militias loyal to Iran resolved to destroy any vestige of resistance against the Alawite regime. Even so, the tide was turning in favour of the rebel Sunni Syrian militias until the entry of Russia, supporting the Syrian regime with air power.

Canada had responded to the United Nations' call for countries of the Western world to respond to the refugee emergency by accepting 50,000 Syrian refugees, both government- and privately-sponsored. It is the needs of these refugees given haven in Canada, many of whom live in Quebec now, that a Syrian regime-sponsored consul would serve. Given the very obvious connection of the honourary consul to the Syrian regime whom Canada had officially welcomed, the untenable scope of the situation is incredible.

A photo of Assad and Waseem posted to Waseem’s Facebook page. (wramli/Facebook)

The new consul, in his online postings makes no secret of his admiration of and support of Bashar al Assad and  his murderous regime. That the government of Canada welcomed his appointment is shocking in and of itself. That that same government now professes to have had no idea of the situation is equally beyond belief. The minister involved blames her bureaucrats. In one online post Ramli wrote on September 23, he accuses the Syrian American Medical Society giving humanitarian assistance in Syria, of supporting terrorist groups.

In another post he extends an invitation to readers of the post to visit Syria for themselves so they can "see for yourself the truth that mainstream media is hiding from you". As for the storied Syrian White Helmets, Syrian Sunnis who have dedicated themselves to rescuing wounded civilians after regime bombing runs, risking their lives to save the lives of others and often risking the regime's deliberate after-bombings targeting them, Ramil describes them as a "terrorist organization" linked to al-Qaeda.

The website for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs states quite clearly that such appointments, made by the department's office of protocol "should avoid controversial or politically active persons, or persons whose professional activities might otherwise interfere with the effective discharge of consular functions". How likely is it that Syrian Sunnis so horribly persecuted by the Alawite Syrian regime would turn for consular assistance in acquiring documents to a representative of that murderous regime?

Official Canada has been most helpful to Bashar al Assad in establishing his regime as one deserving of diplomatic relations with Western democratic liberal governments that focus on human rights and equality.The Syrian honourary consul drives around in a red Humvee, a customized 1Syria licence plate and photographic artwork of the Syrian president emblazoned on a side window. On Ramli's Facebook  profile photos are posted with him standing smiling beside Assad, and another, with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

This man had the unmitigated gall of stating "...We hope to see Canada playing a bigger role in world peace"; the 'we' he refers to being Syria whose long-standing war of epic proportions by an odiously loathsome regime, celebrates the role Canada could play in promoting world peace ... of course aided by Canada's willingness to host a representative of the promoter of death and destruction.

A photo of Waseem’s vehicle, posted to his Facebook page. (wramli/Facebook)

Bashar al-Assad Triumphant

"It's over, we're finished."
"We have no friends any more. This is where it all ends. We're cornered and the entire country has been handed over [to the Syrian regime].
"We can't do anything anymore despite having weapons; the rebel leaders took the pay cheque."
"I am a special case because I am a child of the revolution. I am sure the Russians will hand me over to the regime."
"My fate is unknown now, I don't know what to do. I need to leave Syria because they [the Syrian military] won't leave me alive."
Mouawiya Syasneh, rebel fighter, Daraa, Syria

The Syrian national flag rises in the midst of damaged buildings in Daraa-al-Balad, an opposition-held part of the southern city of Dara on July 12. (Mohamad Abazeed/AFP/Getty Images)

Now an adult, Mouawiya Syasneh was a teen before Syria's civil war roared into action taking the attention of the world through the ferociously barbaric steps taken by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to destroy the intention of the "terrorists" who were in fact, Sunni Syrian civilians, the majority population in Syria, protesting that the government failed their needs, treating them with gross inequality in comparison to the minority Alawite Shiites but who comprised the government.

The city of Daraa, where Syasneh was born and raised and went to school, was rebellion central in 2011, when he and some of his teen-age friends expressed their resistance to a government that failed to respect its entire population's needs in a clear sectarian division of the haves and the have-nots. Those boys defiantly sprayed a graffiti message on the walls of their school that was clearly anti-Assad. In Syria the eyes and ears of the government are everywhere.

It took no time before all the boys were arrested for their act of insubordination to authority and insults to the president. Incarcerated, they were tortured before finally being released, although the modus operandi of the military changed somewhat as hostilities became heightened and conflict began in earnest with rebel groups fighting a guerrilla-style war, and the regime responding with a clear human-rights offending program of annihilation of the "terrorists".

Foreign fighters from elsewhere were attracted both by the breakdown of orderly restraint and the compulsion of Sunnis to respond to Shiite aggression and the entry of seasoned Islamist fighters with links to al-Qaeda, along with the various rebel Syrian groups began to make headway in toppling the Syrian regime, even as it resorted to deadly mass assaults through chemical weapons bombs, barrel bombs and helicopter gunships firing at helpless civilians.

The conflict gradually reduced Syria's second largest city to rubble, as well as half of its capital city. Ancient heritage sites and mosques, along with hospitals and schools were targeted by the regime. But the balance of power had shifted away from the government even though Iran's al-Quds force of the Republican Guard Corps and the Shiite Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah fought alongside regime forces. The tide turned when Russia entered and began aerial bombing in support of Assad.

Smoke rises over buildings that were hit by Syrian government forces bombardment, in Daraa province, southern Syria, in early July. Syrian activists and state media said Thursday the rebels have agreed to surrender Daraa, the first city to revolt against President al-Bashar Assad with Arab Spring-inspired protests seven years ago. (Nabaa Media via AP)

Now, Daraa, the city where the revolt against Assad's misrule began, is under government control. Syria has lost 400,000 of its citizens to the rebellion; Assad's response to his people's request for an even hand resulting in the deaths that mark the savagery of this civil war. Millions of Syrians have been internally displaced, and millions more - in all representing half of the entire population -- have become refugees; most settling in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, but many struggling to reach Europe, inundating that continent with the desperation of their flight from Assad.

The Free Syrian Army, a coalition of rebel groups, had decided it had little option but to negotiate away their hold on Daraa for a promise by the regime to allow the fighters and their families to withdraw and seek haven in other parts of the country still in the hands of rebel groups. While they can be assured of amnesty, Syasneh and others like him are in most likelihood exempt from the agreement and marked for a very nasty death.

There is this that distinguishes many Arab Muslim dictators; they like Saddam Hussein and now Bashar al-Assad, have the stomach for inflicting mass murder on their fellows; it is what is being seen in Yemen through Saudi Arabia's intervention in that civil war, spurred on by the Islamic Republic of Iran inciting the Shiite Houthis to rebel against the ruling Sunnis. It is what Iraq and Iran experienced when they fought for years, each slaughtering the other's young males, including teens.

Internally displaced people from Deraa province are gathered near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Quneitra, Syria. Photograph: Alaa Al-Faqir/Reuters

The Daraa agreement is of a type seen elsewhere as the Syrian regime recovers its ruined geography, allowing the rebels to leave the shattered infrastructure that was once a city, and to withdraw to other areas still held by the rebels, and which government forces and their allies plan to wipe out and up one after the other until the entire territory is restored to its former status, minus millions of Syrians in a vast display of sectarian wiping-up, transforming the country to a Shiite stronghold.

An estimated 250,000 Syrian civilians flooded out of the area, displaced by the government offensive. They sit now in the misery of mass displacement around Quneitra, a province bordering Israel, and along the border with Jordan. Where they will go from there is  unknown since both Israel and Jordan have closed their borders to refugees; Israel for obvious reasons and Jordan because it can manage no further intake of Syrian refugees.

For the time being they are no worse off than Syrian civilians in Idlib, the northwest Syrian province holding a million displaced Syrians in dire living conditions, exposed to airstrikes carried out by the regime which can never recognize too much material destruction much less heaps of mangled bodies. "Idlib is a crematory", Russian mediators have warned those fleeing Daraa. They should know, after all.

Displaced Syrian children from the Daraa province fleeing shelling by pro-government forces wait in a makeshift camp to cross the Jordanian border, near the town of Nasib, southern Syria, on July 1, 2018. ( AFP / Mohamad ABAZEED)

The Untouchable, Unaccountable, Bashar al-Assad

"Russia is making the wrong choice by not exercising its unique influence. To allow [the] Syria regime to use chemical weapons against its own people is unconscionable."
"We will pursue accountability."
"[Reports of chlorine gas being used against civilians in Eastern Ghouta are] very concerning."
US State Department spokesman Heather Nauert

The White Helmets‏Verified account @SyriaCivilDef

3 civilians killed and many injured, including suffocation cases among children, women and #CivilDefense volunteers! 28 air raids, 70 surface-to-surface missiles, some loaded w/chlorine gas and 200+ artillery shells targeted cities in #Eastern_Ghouta today! #Doumasuffocating

12:21 PM - 1 Feb 2018

"Today Douma woke up breathing chlorine in the western neighbourhoods."
"Only the sun can protect us. The international community has abandoned us."
Area nurse

It was in 2013 when Russian President Vladimir Putin persuaded U.S. President Barack Obama that diplomacy is preferable to military action. This was President Obama's famous "red line" that he would not countenance Syria's President Bashar al-Assad tip-toeing past. Well, tip-toe he did. And then; nothing. Oh, it was arranged that the international group that monitors and sequesters chemical weapons oversee the complete removal of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile to ensure no further chemical attacks would or could take place.

It was a feel-good moment. No military action to punish the Syrian president whose regime had already been responsible for the deaths of an estimated 300,000 Syrian Sunnis, all of whom he had characterized as "terrorists" for protesting the inequities of the Shiite Alawite regime, rewarding the minority Alawites and persecuting the majority Sunni population. The first peaceful demonstrations were answered with arrests, torture and death; no exception for school children. The protesters decided little option was left to them but to respond in kind, and militias were formed.

Had Vladimir Putin not decided it would be in Russia's best interests in the Middle East to establish a deep-sea harbour and fleet and a military air terminal base handy to it in Syria the decision to ingratiate Moscow with Damascus by giving it air cover, bombing and strafing the rebel-held areas of Syria while pretending their only goal was to attack and diminish the presence of Islamic State as a threat to regional stability would never have taken place. Clearly, Mr. Putin is none too particular with the company he keeps.

A Syrian girl holds an oxygen mask over the face of an infant at a make-shift hospital following a reported gas attack Credit: AFP

Syria's Assad graduated instead to barrel bombs and sieges, starving out rebel-held areas of Aleppo and areas like Eastern Ghouta. But he was also not averse to drawing on his secret stores of chemical weapons on occasion, and another several occasions occurred within the past month, the most recent a day ago when missiles hit Douma in the suburbs of rebel-held Damascus, spreading chlorine gas. There have been indications that Islamic State has a store of chemicals for like purpose, but it is abundantly obvious that whatever heinous acts Islamic State will indulge in, Assad will as well.

So the Syrian regime is still producing chemical weapons with the intention of using them to great effect in terrorizing the "terrorists" whose mortal sin is their determination to remove a bloody tyrant from the dreadful power he holds over tens of millions of Syrians. That power has been used in mass slaughter,  in destroying ancient citadels of culture, in demolishing the living areas of Syria's cities, creating millions of internally displaced and millions more refugees as people flee the terror not of ISIL but of Bashar al-Assad, a merciless mass murderer.

A United Kingdom-based weapons analyst, Elliot Higgins, examined videos posted by opposition activists of the cases of three missiles. The serial numbers, he said, indicated they were from the same batch of missiles carrying chemical weapons as those previously used with similar results in an attack in the same area that occurred on January 22. And while the United States has issued warning of "consequences" over chemical weapons use, nothing yet has erupted similar to the attack President Trump had ordered for similar reasons last year on a Syrian air force base.

U.S. officials speak of an "evolving" program by the Syrian regime to produce "new kinds of weapons", to improve their military capability or to feign innocence of any such actions as now being attributed to them, to convince the international community it has done no such thing, therefore cannot be held accountable for what others, such as the swiftly disappearing ISIL, has committed to.

An April 2017 chemical attack merited a response by an offshore missile strike yet both international observers and the United States admit those weapons remain in use. Both chlorine and sarin have been used in recent attacks, while Assad has altered the tactics employed to reduce attribution to his forces. American intelligence, sample testing by third countries and social media affirm the regime's use of the chemicals.

A Syrian boy holds an oxygen mask over the face of an infant at a make-shift hospital following a reported gas attack on the rebel-held besieged town of Douma Credit: AFP