Bastard Al-Assad Falls 🪶 Rejoice, Rejoice (For Now Maybe)

By AM Tuesday, December 17, 2024

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Barry Gilheany ✍ In the end, the event crept up on the world unnoticed.

The overthrow of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Assad dynasty which had ruled Syria for 54 years in a manner which requires the redefinition of the words “brutality” and tyranny on the weekend of 7-8 December 2024 happened with such stunning speed as to make the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 look like a gradual process.


While the world was focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, nobody apart from seemingly thwarted Syrian revolutionary sympathisers on X had any inkling that the rebel forces led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) who, after their routing in Aleppo in 2016 by the Syrian and Russian air forces and then their bussing to Idlib province, had quietly regrouped for the last two years and then launched a mini-blitzkrieg that in a space of a week saw the recapture of Aleppo, Hama and Homs leading then to final victory with the liberation of Damascus and the melting away with the regular Syrian Army. Meanwhile, mindful of the fate of other dictators such as Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein and Col Gaddafi who unwisely stayed to fight futile battles against tide and time, Assad and his entourage flew to the lair of his ally, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow.

It is difficult to settle on an appropriate lexicon to describe the feelings and reactions of the Syrians at the moment of their liberation. Joy and ecstasy at the removal of over two generations of cruel and arbitrary dictatorship versus agony at the discovery of the full horrors of the gulag complex that almost 100,000 Syrians disappeared into. At its apex was the Sadanya prison complex which can more accurately be described as a death camp or ‘human slaughterhouse. Constructed with the help of Nazi functionary Alois Brunner who died a fugitive in Syria during the reign of Hafez Al-Assad it is likely that up to 13,000 inmates were tortured and murdered there in the course of the Syrian Civil War. The scenes of bundled up clothing, shoes and other personal effects and the obvious squalor in which prisoners lived recall the optics of Tuol Sleng from Pol Pot’s Cambodia and even Auschwitz. The unimaginable atrocities perpetrated there and the attempted destruction of incriminating paperwork by the guards are reminiscent of similar cover tracking by the retreating SS and Khmer Rouge. And just like those homicidal industrial complexes, it is to be hoped that Sadanya be preserved as a museum to bear witness to another episode in the history of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity.

Or it is hope at a new dawn of freedom, reckoning and reconciliation for the Syrian people versus far at the prospect of another form of tyranny of Islamist vintage. Or fear about the disintegration that visited Iraq and Libya after the overthrow of Saddam and Ghaddafi, respectively. But the formation of an interim administration consisting of representatives from different rebel factions and of technocrats from the old regime which conspicuously did not happen in the aftermath of the fall of the afore mentioned regimes is a very hopeful sign. Also encouraging is the avowal (so far) of HTS leader Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani not to rule as an Islamist. Its evolution from an Al-Queda franchise to a national liberation type movement should be welcomed and the deregistering of HTS as a terrorist entity by western nations such as the UK and US would accelerate this journey.

Syria like most other MENA nations is a mosaic of differing tribes, ethnicities and religious groupings held together at the centre by strong, repressive governments from a single tribe like the Alawite Shia sect from which the Assads hail. They stay in power through a mixture of buying off tribal leaders and repression. Such centrifugal pressures are legacies of their moments of formation; the carving up of the Middle East by Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot agreement in the aftermath of World War and the forced union of tribes into new mandates such as Iraq and Syria. Because of their tortured origin, MENA nations such as Syria also face centripetal or external pressures such as aggrandisement from external actors such as Turkey and Israel and during its Civil War had Iran and its proxies Hezbollah propping up the Assad regime along with Russia.

But above all Syria is a nation in trauma. I write this now having watched an almost half hour feature on Channel 4 News on the sheer dimensions of the atrocities that Bastard al-Assad’s regime inflicted on its country. In one mass grave, it is believed, lie the remains of 100 – 150,000 regime victims. Witnesses who were conscripted to transport the dead recall daily deliveries of up to thirty corpses for any number of weeks. One particularly grotesque cargo consisted of a hundred bodies frozen together who had to be burned by Fire Brigades to separate them. The dead bore the calling cards of Mukhabarat; fingernails ripped out of children, cigarette burns, whipping by cables; blunt instrument trauma to the head. If Syria is to recover and move forward as a nation, then there has to be a full reckoning with its recent and present past. And this reckoning begins with the gathering and collation of the documents to be used in the evidentiary proceedings in future prosecutions of the architects and participants of the 21st century largest charnel house; either in Syria or at the Hague.

And it is not just the Assad crime family, the secret police top brass and those at the top of Air Force Intelligence who must face accountability for their serial crimes against humanity. Those who had the capacity to act but didn’t when the need called need to show humility. First up, the Obama administration who laid down red lines over the use of chemical weapons but who failed to do so after the egregious violation of them in the sarin gas attack on Eastern Gouta on 21st August 2013 which led to 1,440 excruciating deaths. That they didn’t was due in no small measure to the House of Commons vote against sanctioning military action against Assad on 31st August thanks to the then Labour Leader Ed Miliband whipping his MPs into voting No. This was the most shameful episode in Labour’s history since Tony Blair led the UK into backing George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq a decade previously; the fallout from which being a significant contributory factor in the reluctance to sanction this much more justifiable intervention. The next eleven years of Syrian history were thus to be Russian, Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli history as well.

Next are the assortment of useful idiots and sycophants who provided cover to the Assad regime. Top of the usual suspects are George Galloway and Nick Griffin; for Galloway it was Assad’s opposition to the “Zionist entity” that was his route to sanctification; for the former leader of the BNP, it was that as well as being a supposed a bulwark against Radical Islam that fitted the bill. Galloway has just declared that he has “given up” on the Arab cause in the wake of Assad’s fall at the hands of “Ten Thousand Chinamen” or more accurately Uighurs; this begs the question as to whether he was a beneficiary of Assad’s financial largesse. Then there are the four Irish parliamentarians; Clare Daly, Mick Wallace, Catherine Connolly and Maureen Sullivan who, in the cases of Daly and Wallace frequently shilled against any sanctions against Assad and also Putin for his Ukrainian aggression in the European Parliament, and also along with of Ms Connolly and Ms Sullivan made a number of visits to Syria in 2017-18. They met with Assad and parroted the Assadist line that Syria was at war with “genocidal extremists.” As any investigation into the mass homicidal criminality of the Assad regime progresses, it would be reasonable to question this quadrumvirate as to what pecuniary gain they made and indict them as accessories to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

One particular foul episode concerning Wallace was his role in denigrating the report of the International Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (ICPCW) into the sarin gas attack on Douma by the Assad regime in April 2017 and parroting the regime line that it was rebels who were responsible; a lie that was proven to be such by the Open Source investigative body Bellingcat.

In the rogues gallery also are Alt Media sources such as The Gray Zone which parroted the regime line about the use of chemical weapons as well as the slander that the Syrian White Knights - a volunteer civil defence body which rescued people from the rubble caused by regime and Russian air raids - were agents of British intelligence and Al-Queda and used crisis actors to provide fake news. Two prominent members of The Gray Zone are Max Blumenthal, son of the journalist Syndey, and Aaron Mate, son of renowned addiction and trauma specialist, Gabor – both certainly are not pursuing their distinguished parents’ vocations of speaking truth to power.

So, congratulations to the Syrian people for liberating themselves from one of the world’s most cruel and longest lasting tyranny without external intervention. Enjoy the moment. You have shown that where evil exists, retention of the status quo is never an option.

 

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.