By Latheef Farook
While Arab dictators embraced Syrian tyrant Bashar Al Assad and readmitted him to the Arab League, perhaps on the instruction of United States, Canada and the Netherlands have taken Syria to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over war crimes he committed against his own people.
According to reports , in their application to the court, the two countries accused Assad of having committed “countless violations of international law”. These violations include the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment… including through abhorrent treatment of detainees, inhumane conditions in places of detention, enforced disappearances, the use of sexual and gender-based violence, and violence against children,” they said in a statement released by the ICJ.
Syria, a Sunni Muslim majority country where the Shiites comprise only 15 percent .However Syria has been ruled by Shiite military dictator Hafez Al Assad since 1970 military coup and was succeeded by his equally cruel son Bashar Al Assad. During the 2011 Arab uprising the oppressed Syrians came out on peaceful demonstrations seeking basic freedom .
Bashar Al Assad responded with an unprecedented worse than medieval style barbarity and ferocity . People resisted. Assad bombed and destroyed city after city and village after village indiscriminately slaughtering people. Assad weakened his own country and made to Israel safer and stronger. In return United States wanted to protect this war criminal.
Dr Amira Abu-El Fetough
explaining why US,Europe, Israel and their Arab collaborators protect Assad columnist Dr Amira Ab0-El Fetough had this to state in her article;
The US protects Assad’s brutal regime. Saudi Arabia would not have hosted the butcher Bashar, nor would Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman have dared to welcome him without explicit orders from Washington. This is the sort of role distribution at which the US and other colonialists excel.
The butcher has killed his people with explosive barrels and phosphorus cluster bombs, and has now been rewarded. Over a million people have been killed and forcibly displaced more than half of the population. His jails are filled with thousands of people, where they are tortured and abused horrifically. Having destroyed cities, burnt everything in sight, razed buildings with their inhabitants still inside and ruined more than 70 per cent of the country’s infrastructure, he flung open Syria’s doors to Russian and Iranian invasions. The invaders continue to exterminate the remaining Syrian people.
The Arab Spring revolutions in 2011 shook the Arab world to its core. Tyrannical leaders lost their footing. Some fell, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen. Others awaited their fate anxiously, such as Syria’s Assad, who teetered on the brink, only to be rescued by Russia’s intervention. Assad chose the subjugation of Syria under Russian occupation and staying on as a puppet atop the ruins rather than following the fate of his former regional counterparts.
It was not just the Syrian despot who trembled. All the kings and princes in the Arab world shook with him, fearful that their people would also seek freedom, dignity and democracy and that their thrones would fall. Hastily, they allied themselves with the Zionist enemy, which was also disturbed by the Arab Spring. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu made no secret of his desire to keep the Assad regime at the helm in Syria.
After all, Bashar’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, handed the Golan Heights to the Zionist enemy in 1967. Indeed, the elder Assad was a similar tyrant who committed genocidal crimes in Hama, terrifying, plundering, oppressing and crushing the rights of the Syrian majority. Treachery runs deep in Assad blood, and the junior despot maintains his usurped regime without ever firing a single shot towards Israel over all these long years. That is why his replacement has been vetoed.
The UAE is at the centre of the counter-revolutionary movement, aided and abetted by Israel’s Mossad spy agency. It is from there that the Arab Spring has been transformed into bloody autumn in Syria, Libya and Yemen especially. The aim is to instil fear in anyone who contemplates staging a demonstration or even thinks about demanding freedom, democracy and dignity.
The pro-Israel US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all stood against the Syrian revolution, the greatest of all Arab uprisings. The Syrian people made huge sacrifices, as everyone sought to crush them into the ground. From near and far, international hyenas tore at Syria’s wounded body, taking whatever they could and escaping with their spoils, leaving it awash in blood.
The Syrian Revolution has been forsaken by all those who previously identified themselves as “friends of Syria” but went on to seize their share of the spoils. The free people of Syria now put their trust in their Creator, having surrendered themselves to states that claimed to support them and provided them with money and weapons when they carried out their orders. These states have betrayed the people of Syria in favour of regional interests. This has been obvious in Daraa, Aleppo, Homs and Hama.
Syria has thus exposed the treachery and betrayal of close allies and kinfolk. However, the story is unfinished, and the end has yet to be written. Revolutions, like wars, have their ups and downs until the moment of decisive victory arrives. Let Bashar Al-Assad’s ongoing rule and the false celebrations not deceive you; the embers of the revolution still smoulder in the heart of every free Syrian waiting for them to be reignited. Tomorrow is near for those who wait, God willing. In the meantime, wounded Syria is in the embrace of a butcher.
Twelve years later today the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that about 90 per cent of Syrians live below the poverty line, with more than 15 million needing humanitarian assistance, a trend that has been sustained over the past years,” .The risk of collapse of Syria’s critical infrastructure is a pressing concern,” stated ICRC statement.