The Ghouta Massacre



Whenever an attack takes place in any part of Syria, supporters of Bashar Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, in an effort to justify their sham position regarding the crisis, always say that they will not believe any claim of any gruesome attack against civilians unless evidence is provided and verified by independent sources. However they fail to explain the reasons for Assad’s refusal to allow Arab and foreign journalists into the country to report what is happening.

They also say that Assad finally decided to allow an international team to enter the country in order to investigate whether chemical weapons were used in Homs, Aleppo and Idlib, yet they deliberately conceal the fact that these international observers are often accompanied by Assad’s security forces. Their movement is impeded and controlled, and access to important incriminating evidence is denied.

How can criminal events of this sort be verified under these conditions? And how much evidence is required to convince Assad supporters that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being perpetrated against civilians on a daily basis?

There is no point in dwelling on useless distractions under the guise of “verifying evidence.” Whether chemical weapons are being used or not should not be the question. The claim that Assad ordered his troops to use chemical weapons cannot be proved under the circumstances engineered by his security forces. However, it should not be surprising to anybody that a regime that has used these chemical weapons at least once in Hama in 1982 can actually do it again. It also should not be surprising to anybody that Assad will deny it, and blame the West and Israel for orchestrating a propaganda campaign against him in an effort to justify a foreign invasion of Syria.

Syrian history teaches us that we do not need foreign and international teams to tell us whether the Assad regime is capable of engineering and executing terrible attacks against civilians. We also do not need Israel to inform us that Assad is willing to do whatever it takes to maintain his grip on power in Syria. And we do not need supporters of the regime to inform us that the United States, Israel and their allies have a vested interest in keeping Syria tumultuous and unstable.

The core of the problem in Syria is Assad and his regime. Everything else there is a symptom of four decades of political and social repression. Disillusioned and impressionable youth do not wake up in the morning, drink their NesCafe, eat their muffins and decide to join Salafi and Al-Qaeda affiliated brigades simply because it is in their genes to do so. I believe that if these youth had any other viable, coherent and stable venues to channel their frustrations and anger, they would not, under any circumstance, join groups that do not hesitate to send them to their death.

The deaths in Ghouta write another ugly chapter in Syrian history. “Unverified” videos and photos shows scores of dead children covered with their Akfan (grave clothes) after being poisoned by a some sort of chemical from an “unknown” source. Such an attack, given its large scale, the number of death, and the accuracy in execution, can only be perpetrated by Assad’s force. It is true that the opposition, and more precisely Salafi groups, do indeed have possession of chemical weapons, and it is true that they might have used them in different locations; however, I believe, given the amount of damage Ghouta has sustained, this particular attack was conducted by the regime.

If we are going to continue to busy ourselves with useless intellectual indulgence in rhetoric regarding “credible” evidence, and wait for more people to be killed by both the regime and the opposition, then we should probably wait until every single Syrian is dead to be able to begin our little investigation into what has happened.

2 comments:

  1. The article carries on with the same narratives of the Americans, Israeli and some of the Arabs. A cheer leading for American intervention nothing more, and political prostitution at its best.

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  2. I wonder if you read my other blog post before accusing me of cheerleading for an American intervention: http://omar-chaaban.blogspot.ca/2013/08/syria-and-prospects-of-american.html

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