Bashar Assad should be tried for crimes against humanity not Rehabilitated

The world is holding trilateral talks aimed at rehabilitating Bashar Assad who is believed to have been responsible for crimes against humanity.

Bashar Assad is undoubtedly an indelible badge of dishonour and shame, not only for Arabs but for the entire humanity.  Indeed, the fact that this contemptible beast is still alive, free and even accorded respect in some quarters,  constitutes a clarion indictment of our world, especially ourselves as human beings.

Russia,  Iran and Turkey, yes Turkey, are holding trilateral talks aimed at rehabilitating Bashar Assad, who is believed to have been responsible for crimes against humanity comparable to genocidal atrocities carried out by notorious mass killers like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler prior to and during the Second World War.

Indeed, ever since 2011, when some Syrians took to the streets rather peacefully, demanding free elections, Assad promptly ordered his security forces to strafe them with machine-gun fire, killing and maiming hundreds of mostly school children.

This is how the mass murder of more than a million Syrians, including hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians started.

Rehabilitating Bashar Assad: A badge of dishonour

 Assad, army, tightly controlled by his esoteric Shiite sect known as Alawis,  employed the regime’s entire death machine including poisonous chemical gases, to exterminate entire neighbourhoods and population centres.

The regime also inflicted incalculable deaths and widespread mass destruction by dropping explosives barrels from high altitudes, flattening largely populated areas, and causing thousands of casualties.

Aside from denunciations by western powers, especially the United States, Assad’s Russian-supplied arsenal continued to spread death and destruction throughout Syria. In 2014-15, when Syrian rebel forces were marching to Damascus, Russia formally decided to intervene by dispatching dozens of military personnel and military equipment including advanced warplanes.

For its part,  Iran, in coordination with the Russians,  deployed dozens of Shiite militias to protect the only nominally Shiite regime from his mostly “Sunni opponents.” The powerful Lebanese Shiite militia known as Hezbullah also deployed several thousand fighters to protect the terrorist regime from falling. In the meantime, the West refused to supply the rebels with purely defensive weapons to defend themselves from deadly Russian airstrikes. Numerous massacres were perpetrated and hundreds of thousands of civilian homes were destroyed. In short, a majority of Syrian towns and villages came to resemble German towns at the end of the Second World. War.

The scorched-land policy which Russia employed in Syria forced as many as 15 million Syrians to leave their homes  or what had remained of them.

Assad warmly welcomed the expulsion of the bulk of Syrians, saying rather gleefully and shamelessly that Syria didn’t need disloyal citizens. In other words, the Stalinist Butcher considered as treacherous and disloyal to every Syrian demanding democratic rights, human rights, free elections and basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech.

The criminal Iranian role

Iran’s determined support for Assad’s sectarian regime is believed to be motivated by Iranian Mullacracy’s religious hatred of Sunni Islam, to which a majority of Syrians adhere to. Iran’s ultimate goal in Syria is to proselyte considerable numbers of Syria’s Sunni majority into the Twelver Shiite sect, the official religion of Iran. It is really sad and lamentable that a regime that prides itself on fighting and toppling the defunct repressive regime of Shah Muammed Reza Pahlavi has been embracing an even more murderous and evil regime, namely the thuggish Assad regime. 

Read Also : Iran’s embrace of Bashar Assad: An indelible shame

Rehabilitating Bashar Assad: a message of Betrayal

There is no doubt that Rehabilitating Bashar Assad represents a message of Betrayal to the forces of democracy, liberty and human rights in the Middle East and beyond.

The message states in a clarion manner that it is futile to try to depose criminal tyrants and evil dictators no matter what they do and how many millions of people take to the streets demanding their departure.

I am not going to elaborate much on the Russian role in Syria. Russia under the Putin dictatorship accords no value to liberty and wouldn’t really care how many Syrian children are exterminated by Bashar Assad.

Russia is Russia and Putin is Putin,  and expecting the evil tyrant to morph into something more humane or more civilized would be a futile exercise in naivety, wishful thinking and gullibility.

Just look at what he is doing in Ukraine. He has simply destroyed Ukraine just as he had destroyed Syria.

Hence, there is no point in rebuking Putin for his gargantuan evil crimes.

Nor will I expect any positive change on the part of the Iranian regime. A regime that claims to carry a sublime divine message while showering demonstrators with bullets is a murderous regime par excellance, very much like Israel and the Syrian regime itself. It is a hopeless regime.

Enter Turkey

I don’t wish to lump Turkey with Iran and Russia. At the very least Turkey doesn’t indiscriminately spray demonstrators with machinegun bullets as the Syrian and Iranian regimes do. Moreover, Turkey has hosted more than five million Syrian refugees who fled the Russian-backed and-Iranian-funded Assad’s holocaust against his own people, so that he would remain President forever against his people’s desire.

Turkey gave these Syrians accommodation, education and in many instances employment. This is why, it would be unfair to lump someone who gives refugees shelter, food, protection and accommodations with someone who gave Bashar Assad the weapons and financial means to brutally oppress them, slaughter their families and rain bombs and explosive powder barrels on their homes and neighbourhoods. The difference is very vast, indeed.

Turkey: Vital Strategic Asset for Muslims

Moreover, Turkey remains an important strategic asset for the Muslim world, a fact ignored and dismissed by Iran and Assad.

None the less, the Turkish involvement in efforts aimed at reanimating the Hitler of Damascus is making Turkey’s friends and supporters anxious and gravely worried. This is because Assad must under all circumstances be given the chance to commit a greater holocaust than the one he has already carried out. 

Undoubtedly, Assad and his murderous regime will remain a badge of dishonour for the entire humanity. This is what the Turkish leadership must realize.

True, restoring relations with Assad, might bring some tactical benefits for Turkey, especially with regard to Kurdish rebels in northeastern Syria.

However, initiating any measure of strategic cooperation with Bashar Assad would immensely harm Turkey’s image.  Assad and his Iranian masters should belong to the past, not to the future.

Moreover, Turkey which was on the verge of war with Russia in order to protect Syrian refugees in the Idlib region from the devastating Russian airstrikes and savagery of Assad’s sectarian army must make sure that these refugees will not be the target of Assad’s revenge attacks. (end)