Incomplete Coverage of an Ominous Syrian Situation

Winter comes after fall

When Japan, already considered an enemy of the United States, sent its air force to U.S. territory and bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the same date on the calendar that former opposition forces of the Iraq government entered Damascus, the U.S. government and media emphasized the more serious situation ─ the U.S. was at war with Japan. Press coverage and U.S. government response to the “fall” of the Assad government distracted from the serious situation ─ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), successor to former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, which the U.S. labelled a terrorist organization and enemy of the United States and previously fought to prevent gaining control of Syria, sent its forces to seize control of Syria.

The conventional U.S. media treated the ominous events as a tale of the daily lives of two individuals — Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and Bashar al-Assad — Jesse James vs the evil banks. Amidst their entertaining stories are misinterpretations, lack of depth in analysis, and inattention to details. More valid discussion of a momentous event and where the United States is centered in the crisis are helpful.

Bashar Assad had already fallen.
With half the population displaced or out of the country, with sanctions depriving the people of energy, and with foreign forces wandering at will throughout the countryside, Syria navigated on fumes. Its government hardly breathed. Assad had already fallen. Considering the coming winter chill, he decided to change residences.

The U.S. had no fingers in the cookie jar.
What a whopper.

• Is it a coincidence that the U.S. supported Syrian Democratic Forces launched an attack on villages in the northern countryside of Deir Al Zor province on Tuesday, December 3?

• Is it a coincidence that, on Nov 12, U.S. Central Command in Eastern Syria said, “it had carried out attacks against ‘Iranian backed groups’ in Syria, hitting nine targets at two separate locations in the country over the previous 24-hour period.”

• Didn’t the U.S. air force bomb, strafe, and repulse militias from the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces, who tried to enter Iraq and assist the Syrian military?

• Why did the “US A-10s, B-52s, target dozens of ISIS sites in Syria? Air Force planes dropped roughly 140 munitions on a ‘very broad’ gathering of ISIS fighters early Sunday morning (December 8).” Why weren’t the attacks done before the walkover? Obvious answer ─ previously the U.S. encouraged ISIS’ needling the Syrians. Now, Uncle Sam did not favor ISIS needling the new favorites in the neocon world.

Another U.S. counterproductive and foreign policy failure.
U.S. foreign policy initiatives have one common thread ─ counterproductive and homicidal.

• Calculated to prevent North Vietnam from obtaining control of all of Vietnam, 10 years of war resulted in 1-2 million Vietnamese casualties and North Vietnam obtaining control of Vietnam.

• Fifty years of a Cold War struggle, in which the United States inflicted casualties on millions around the world, designed to prevent the Soviet Union from extending its hammer and sickle and challenge U.S. hegemony, resulted in a Russia that extends its territory and vigorously challenges U.S. hegemony.

• U.S. troops, sent on a mission to feed and stabilize Somalia, shot up the place, paved the road for al-Shabaab, a Salafi terrorist organization, and scurried out of an anarchic Somalia.

• The U.S. fought twenty years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with…..the Taliban.

• The U.S. invasion of a moribund Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, alleged as an opportunity to remove an international threat, triggered the emergence of a parade of international threats, which terrorized the Fertile Crescent, and solidified the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces that challenge the U.S. in Iraq. These forces ally with Iran, which the U.S. State Department considers an international threat. The Iraq Body Count project documents 186,901 – 210,296 violent civilian deaths during the Iraq war. In 2007, due to sectarian violence that emerged from the U.S. invasion, Iraq had about 4 million displaced persons. Between January 2014 and August 2015, 2.9 million persons fled their homes in three new mass waves of displacement following offensives by ISIL.

• Together with NATO, the U.S. replaced Muammar Gaddafi, who suppressed al-Qaeda terrorists, with the same terrorists, and engineered the creation and arming of several terrorists groups in North Africa.

• After sending its military into Syria’s civil war, a war that estimated deaths at about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, with defined purpose of preventing ISSIS from seizing control of Syria, the U.S. enabled Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the successor to al-Qaeda’s previous partner, Al-Nusra Front, to seize control of Syria.

The release of dissidents from prisons was an incomplete story.
Media attention to Saydnaya prison, “which had become synonymous with arbitrary detention, torture and murder,” would have been genuine if the same attention had been given to similar prisons in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The horrific incarcerations of dissidents in the three mentioned countries cannot be adequately described in less than a 1000 page book. Here are some details.

Israel has, by magnitudes, exceeded Syria in the number of detainees of Palestinian dissidents.

On 11 December 2012, the office of then-Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stated that since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or roughly 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population, had been imprisoned by Israel at one point in time. According to Palestinian estimates, 70% of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail terms in Israeli prisons as a result of activities against the occupation.

From the New Yorker magazine, March 21, 2024, The Brutal Conditions Facing Palestinian Prisoners

Israel has also detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza; prisoners who have described extensive physical abuse from Israeli forces, and, already, at least twenty-seven detainees from Gaza have died in military custody. At the same time, Israeli forces have arrested thousands more Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, at least ten of whom have reportedly died in Israel prisons.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (P.C.A.T.I.), a non-governmental organization, established in 1990, represents Palestinians and Israelis who claim to have been tortured by Israeli authorities. In the New Yorker article, they claim,

We’re currently looking at almost ten thousand Palestinian detainees from the West Bank and Gaza…We know that the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) has been banned from visiting all Israeli prisons since October 7th. We also know—through evidence that P.C.A.T.I. and other N.G.O.s have collected—of what we view as systemic abuse and violence by prison guards toward Palestinian detainees since October 7th. We’ve documented nineteen different incidents of torture and abuse in seven different Israel Prison Service (I.P.S.) facilities by different I.P.S. units, all of which have led us to believe that we’re looking at a policy rather than just isolated incidents.

Although the number of arbitrary executions in Saydnaya prison is not known, much mention is made of the executions. Passing mention is made of the hundreds of arbitrary executions of Palestinians in the West Bank, shot while escaping Israeli military, and the tens of thousands murdered in Gaza.

Where are investigations into the number of dissidents held in Saudi and Egypt jails. We read of constant executions in Saudi Arabia and pay no attention to the reports. No execution has matched the grisly slicing and dicing of Saudi journalist, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, “who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 by agents of the Saudi government.”

We now have good terrorists.
Questioned, in a CNN interview, as to why the U.S. accepts HTS, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and with a $10m bounty on its leader, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan replied, “The group at the vanguard of this rebel advance, HTS, is actually a terrorist organization designated by the United States. So we have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization. At the same time, of course, we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure. So it’s a complicated situation.”

Placed in words often described to the hypocritical U.S. government, “Yes, they are bad guys and they are a terrorist organization, but they are our bad guys and they are our terrorist organization.”

We know where Assad is; where is the United States?
Uncle Sam’s voices to the world give their usual empty and meaningless words to a packed and meaningful event — closely monitoring, historic opportunity, a moment of risk and uncertainty, work together with allies and partners to urge de-escalation and protect U.S. personnel and military positions, and strongly support a peaceful transition of power.

The U.S. should be forced to answer why it did not use its power to prevent a Civil War that caused an estimated deaths of about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, and why it has not used its power to insist that the more democratically inclined opposition in Syria be immediately given leading roles in the new Syrian government. Isn’t it dangerous to have Mohammed al-Bashir, a deputy in Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s National Salvation Front, serve as “acting” prime minister for Syria’s transitional government. Will Mohammed al-Bashir “act” for one month, one year, or one decade?

Israel has spoken forcefully; its terrorist country smells and recognizes another terrorist country. The U.S. has spoken by not speaking; it now has the clout of Albania in Middle East affairs.

It’s becoming shameful to be a U.S. citizen.