The Syrian Blood on Obama’s Hands Augusto Zimmermann
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/the-syrian-blood-on-obamas-hands/
Syria is presently controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Christians and other religious minorities are being massacred in Syria by the same Islamist group that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad three months ago. More than 1000 people have been killed since last Thursday. The killings have targeted Alawites, Christians and other minorities in Syria’s coastal regions.[1]
On December 8, 2024, the Assad regime in Syria collapsed during a major offensive by Sunni Islamist militants. The Assad family, members of the minority Alawite sect, ruled Syria for over half a century. The capture of Damascus, the capital, in December marked the end of Assad’s rule. Bashar al-Assad fled the capital aboard a plane to Russia, where he joined his family, already in exile, and was granted asylum by the Kremlin.
This was the end of a long campaign by the West to overthrow the Assad regime which culminated in HTS delivering the coup de grace.
In 2011, the US and European Union called for President Assad to resign following the crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events that led to Syria’s civil war. By 2022, around 580,000 people were dead, of whom at least 306,000 were non-combatants. On November 15, 2023, France issued an arrest warrant for Assad for the use of chemical weapons against civilians. Assad dsnied the allegations and accused his accusers, notably the US, of attempting to effect regime change.
The Arab Spring, just to refresh memory, were anti-government protests and army uprisings — promoted by the Obama administration, it should be noted — that in the early 2010s spread across the Middle East and North Africa. Over that period the US did much more than any religious extremist group ‘to permanently enshrine Sharia as the constitutional law of the land throughout the Muslim world.’[2] In Egypt, for example, the Arab Spring empowered Muslim extremists to initiate a bloody persecution that drove hundreds of thousands of Christian Copts to flee the nation. Egyptian political scholar Samuel Tadros writes: ‘The Copts can only wonder today whether, after 2,000 years, the time has come for them to pack their belongings and leave, as Egypt looks less hospitable to them than ever’.[3]
One laudable exception to the ongoing persecution of Mideast Christians was Assad’s Syria, a country where followers of Christ can trace their origins to the beginnings of their faith. The apostle Paul is said to have converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus, from which he went on to spread the religion across the Roman Empire. There, the ousted ruler of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, tried to protect Arab Christians and his Alawite Muslim sect against foreign-backed religious extremists.
Prior to the violent uprisings against the Assad regime in March 2011, Ignatius IV, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, stated that Syria was ‘an oasis of religious tolerance’ where Christians could ‘worship freely, build sanctuaries and run schools’, activities that are strictly restricted by varying degrees in a number of Middle Eastern countries.[4] Middle East scholar Kurt Werthmuller recalls an Easter Sunday visit in January 2012 to Aleppo:
I was visiting from Egypt, where I lived at the time and where Copts were typically seen but not heard, so I was amazed to hear the ringing of church bells and to find a Syriac Easter liturgy broadcasting over loudspeakers to overflow congregants in the city streets![5]
As can be seen, the support Syrian Christians gave to President Assad was entirely justifiable. It was due to the fear, now fully corroborated, that the uprising against his secular government could end in another Islamist takeover that would threaten the very existence of the nation’s multi-religious society.
However, in June 2012 the US began a covert operation to aid military groups fighting Assad’s forces.[6] Some of these groups are Sunni terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. In the course of this US-led campaign against Assad, back in 2012 Jake Sullivan, then White House director of policy planning, wrote to his then-boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”[7] Thus, then-president Barack Obama proclaimed his administration had armed and “vetted” members of the Free Syrian Army. In September 2014, Obama also announced: “We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted.”[8]
But the Free Syrian Army was neither vetted nor moderate. In July 2013, ‘Free Syrian Army fighters entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshoush and began burning houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area. Nor was that an isolated incident.’ [9] Just two days after that attack on Oum Sharshouh, Free Syrian Army rebels
targeted the residents of al-Duwayr/Douar, a Christian village close to the city of Homs and near Syria’s border with Lebanon … Around 350 armed militants forcefully entered the homes of Christian families who were all rounded-up in the main square of the village and then summarily executed.[10]
Now these jihadis are in power.[11] As Robert Spencer reminds us, ‘These are the people whom Barack Obama and Old Joe Biden wanted for years to take power in Syria.’[12] During her recent Senate confirmation hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said: “I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them ‘rebels’, as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, ‘al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria’.[13] At this point, it is abundantly clear that Gabbard was right, and Sullivan was wrong.” As Fox News reported, al-Qaeda-linked terror forces aligned with Syria’s interim new president — a former al-Qaeda terrorist — are being accused of massacring Alawites as well as members of the country’s dwindling Christian community.[14]
Ay contrast, Russia had strong ties with the Assad regime in Syria going back many decades. From 2011, Russia used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block at least four resolutions endorsing anti-government military intervention, and it did not retroactively support Western sanctions on Syria.[15] Russia rightly supported the Assad regime since the beginning of the war against radical Islamists, first politically and then, since September 2015, with military aid. Russia was there to fight against the Islamic State and other Islamic terrorist groups supported primarily by al-Qaeda.[16]
In February 2016, Alexander Yakovenko, Russia’s ambassador to Britain, revealed that the decision to intervene in Syria was made in the summer of 2015, when the Islamic State (IS) arrived in the city of Palmyra. It was to prevent the Syrian capital from being handed over to the jihadists that the Russians intervened.[17] The Kremlin favoured a political solution to the departure of Bashar al-Assad. Of course, as noted by Jacques Baud, a former member of Swiss strategic intelligence,
Let us remember that in terms of international law, whatever our judgement on Bashar al-Assad, Russia [was] officially invited by the Syrian government to intervene in Syria … It is therefore legitimate. In contrast, the United States is operating illegally in Syria. UN Security Council Resolution 2170 of August 15, 2014 does not authorize intervention in a sovereign country (even if it does not like its president!).[18]
It was only after the Russian intervention in Syria that the Islamic State’s territory began to shrink. In late September 2015, Russia proposed the creation of an expanded coalition to fight the Islamic State. Western leaders refused because they were actually not interested in destroying the Islamic State. Their primary goal was not to destroy the Islamic State but to disintegrate Syria. According to John Kerry, who served as the U.S. Secretary of State in the Obama administration, the U.S.-led coalition decided to allow the Islamic State to develop in Syria in the hope it would force the Assad regime to negotiate:
The reason Russia got involved was because ISIS [i.e. Islamic State] had grown stronger. Daesh [i.e. Islamic State] was threatening to reach Damascus and that is why Russia intervened. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government, they were supporting Assad. And we knew it was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was becoming more and more powerful and we thought that Assad was threatened. But we thought we would probably succeed, that Assad would negotiate later. Instead of negotiating, he asked Putin for help.[19]
As it turns out, President Assad was finally ousted by Sunni Islamist militants who sought to reshape the country’s political and sectarian order. As a consequence, Syrian government loyalists are executing religious minorities whilst the West assists passively. Sunni Islamists supporting the ruling elites of HTS have already known to have butchered more than 300 Alawite civilians. Several hundred Alawites had already been killed – including Alawite clerics – before recent clashes between Alawites and HTS allies near Latakia.Armed men loyal to the new Syrian government are presently carrying out field executions while speaking of “purifying the country”. A UK-based independent monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), reports that scores of civilians have been killed after government forces committed “widespread field executions” of young men and adults.[20] ‘Armed men were moving from house to house attacking people as a form of entertainment… They declared jihad on us from all over Syria,’ reported one resident of the city of Latakia.[21]
One of the main targets of these attacks are Syria’s Alawites – some 10 per cent of the population. Several videos appear on social media showing convoys of armed men in vehicles heading to the cities of Latakia and Tartous in the run-up to the violence. ‘It was the battle for liberation. Now it’s a battle for purification (of Syria),’ a narrator accompanying the armed convoys says.[22] ‘To the Alawites, we’re coming to slaughter you and your fathers,’ a man dressed in military gear said in what sounded like an Egyptian accent in one of the videos filmed. “Everyone is going out with guns, we will show you the (strength) of the Sunnis.”[23] “These are the Alawite pigs,” a voice is heard saying before shooting a person on open ground in another video.[24] This highlights that the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda mentality of sectarian hatred exists within the new Syrian HTS government.
Back in April 2022, American officials under then-U.S. President Joe Biden ‘coordinated with the jihadist franchise in an effort to topple the Syrian regime – while claiming they backed only the ‘moderate opposition.”[25]And yet, the toppling of the Assad regime has not brought democracy or peace to the country. Instead, ‘hundreds of Christians, including Greek Orthodox, and Alawites have been killed after clashes broke out on Thursday in the Latakia and Tartous regions on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, according to a human rights monitoring group.’[26]
Syrian Christians see Russia, not the United States, as defender of their faith. The Syrian community in Russia numbered around 7,000 people in 2017, including 2,000 who requested asylum, according to the latest available official data.[27] Russia is doing more for Syrian Christians than NATO, the United Nations and the United States combined.[28] Russian military bases in Syria are currently hosting hundreds of Syrian Christians targeted by genocide by government-backed Islamic terrorists. Of course, this further exposes the European leaders who support the HTS Islamist government. NATO member Turkey works openly with the genocidal regime and other Sunni Islamist forces who are anti-Kurdish and anti-Christian.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, CIArb is a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. He is also the President and Founder of WALTA Legal Theory Association
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