Requiem for Syria, or: A Chronology of Savagery, 27 Nov. 2024-31 Jan. 2025
Part one of a closer look at the implications of regime change in Syria after Assad, its antecedents, and implications for Western nations
I’ve occasionally written about Syria and the Middle East, in particular about the plight of non-Jews and non-Moslems, by which I mean the apparent, concerted, and largely condoned persecution of the remaining Christians:
As the events of the past few days indicate, this is a very real, clear, and imminent danger for everyone who’s not a Sunni moslem.
Yet, these problems were very much expectable, and, in fact, have been waiting to happen as the new power-brokers in Damascus are a far cry from those whom Western gov’ts are supporting.
Hence, the below content, which is two-fold: first, courtesy of second-generation feminist (!) Alice Schwarzer’s magazine Emma, I’ll provide a few chronological notes about the escalation since Mr. Assad’s departure. This is done to provide context for the second piece, some legacy media reporting (finally) about the impending doom for Christians in Syria, courtesy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of all places (tomorrow’s posting)
Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.
Quo vadis Syria? A Chronology
According to legacy media, ‘reassuring signals’ are coming from Syria’s ‘provisional ruler’ Al-Sharaa. The theory of evolution has already been removed from school books. Will Syria suffer the fate of Iran? In this country, too, the Islamists are supported by the West—in the fight against Russia.
By Angelika Mallmann, Emma, 21 Feb. 2025 [source; archived]
27 November 2024: Under the leadership of the Islamist organisation Haiat Tahrir al Shams (HTS, ‘Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’), jihadist groups conquer Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus in a lightning offensive. The leader of the HTS is Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani (now known as Ahmed Al-Sharaa). The medical student and son of a petroleum engineer went underground in 2003 at the age of 21 to fight against ‘the infidels’ who had brought down Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Al-Jolani was captured by the Americans in 2006 and returned to Syria in 2011 ‘with 50,000 dollars’. According to his own words, he got the money from Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who later became the leader of the ‘Islamic State’. Al Jolani used the money to set up the ‘Al Nusra Front’ in Syria, an offshoot of IS, before switching to Al Qaeda three years later. [remember: the enemies of my enemies are my new besties, even though Al Qaeda was the (fake) reason the US waged an all-out war of aggression vs. Iraq]
2015-2024: Following Russia’s support for the Assad regime, Al-Jolani withdrew to the Idlib region. He quickly became the secret ruler of the region with a population of 3.5 million (a third of whom were refugees in camps), where the ‘Syrian Salvation Government’ ruled from 2017, formally independent but de facto under the strict control of HTS and its leader Al-Jolani. According to the Federal Foreign Office, this did not prevent it from investing 37.5 million euros in Idlib [oh, look, Germany paid these islamists] from its own budget and that of the Development Aid Ministry, and another 100 million two years later as ‘emergency aid’. Like all Islamist governments, the HTS invested in social issues: a stable energy supply, internet, shopping centres, schools—albeit strictly segregated by gender [sic, that would be sex]. On-site research by FAZ correspondent Friederike Böge in 2014 revealed, among other things, that women in the region wore headscarves or veils (which was not the case in neighbouring Aleppo). A law on ‘modest dress’ (veiling) had been passed for girls over the age of twelve, and in the Chocolate Corner café in Idlib, for example, women were shielded from the gaze of men by mobile screens. Mass protests in July 2024 were followed by a wave of cleansing in Idlib, which also claimed the lives of around 300 HTS cadres.
8 December 2024: HTS: ‘The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has fled.’ They call on ‘displaced Syrians worldwide’ to return: ‘A free Syria awaits you.’ Al-Jolani, now Ahmad Al-Sharaa, speaks in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. It becomes known that Al-Jolani’s militias were [sic] supported by Qatar and Turkey. And Ukraine supplied the jihadists with weapons: Around 150 FPV drones, supervised by 20 Ukrainian drone operators.
1 December 2024: The newly appointed Minister of Justice Shadi Al-Wasiri announces that all female judges will have to hand over their trials to men, according to the internet. Women should no longer be allowed to dispense justice in the post-Assad regime. The HTS denies this, the Syrian lawyer Hassan Ali Abdullah speaks of a ‘rumour’ on tagesschau.de.
17 December 2024: In an interview with the Lebanese TV station Al-Jadeed, HTS spokesperson Obaida Anaout explains that women cannot take on certain roles due to their ‘psychological and biological limitations’ [welcome back, middle ages, we’ve missed you]. It is ‘too early for Syrian female judges to return to their posts’. (Rim Turkmani, the director of the Syria Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics, provides information on this) [I’m wary of literally any kind of information from exile organisations located in the West].
19 December 2024: Hundreds protest on the streets of Damascus. They demand rights for women and a secular state. Slogan: ‘No free society without free women.’
21 December 2024: The US State Department announces that the US has lifted the 10 million dollar bounty on the head of HTS leader Al-Sharaa, which had been suspended since 2017.
31 December 2024: Western media report that the new government has appointed two women to government posts: Maysaa Sabrine, who was previously deputy head of the Syrian Central Bank, is to ‘continue running the business’. And Aisha Al-Diabas has been appointed head of the ‘Office for Women’s Affairs’. On the Arab-Turkish TV station TRT, she explains:
Women should not oppose their God-given nature, especially their educational role in the family. I will not pave the way for anyone who does not agree with me. We have suffered in the past from institutions that are against our children and women—by that I mean feminist institutions with Western thinking that incite women against men and support homosexuality.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) had already pointed out on 24 December that Aisha Al-Diabas had praised Hamas on Facebook on 7 October 2023 and welcomed the atrocities against Israelis on 7 October [I suppose that doesn’t matter either].
1 January 2025: The new Ministry of Education announces changes to school textbooks. A verse from the Koran was added stating that Jews and Christians had ‘lost their way’. The theory of evolution is removed from school textbooks [kinda explains the high rates of incest among Moslems, doesn’t it?]
3 January 2025: The German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, who announced a ‘feminist foreign policy’ when she took office, travels to Damascus. As widely reported and shown in the media, Al-Jolani shook hands with Baerbock’s French colleague, but not with the German woman, which is normal [sic] for an Islamist, but German media still found surprising. However, Baerbock was not deterred in her mission. She called on Al-Jolani to ensure that Russia leaves its military bases in Syria. It was left to the Nachdenkseiten to ask why the German Foreign Minister called for the closure of the Russian military bases ‘legitimised by treaty and international law’, but not the closure of the American military bases with 2,000 US soldiers ‘established without any basis in international law’.
4 January 2025: The HTS-affiliated Telegram channel Almharar, which describes itself as the ‘official channel of the news organisation Free Syria’, shows four photos of the meeting between the German Foreign Minister and the Syrian leader. In all four photos, Annalena Baerbock is blurred beyond recognition. Logical. Hardcore Islamists are not allowed to show women’s faces and bodies.
4 January 2025: Two videos emerge on social media. They show the new Syrian Minister of Justice, Shadi Al-Waisi, overseeing the execution of two women ‘in the name of Allah’ on the streets of Idlib in 2015. Their offence: ‘adultery and prostitution’.
31 January 2025: De facto ruler Al-Sharaa (formerly Al-Jolani) is officially appointed interim president of Syria, or rather he appoints himself as such. The interim president announces that free elections cannot take place for at least four years. First, a new constitution must be drawn up. Der Spiegel comments: ‘The world fears an Islamist dictatorship, but Syria’s new strongman is sending out reassuring signals.’ Well then.
Bottom Lines
Cause and effect are hardly unknown things, isn’t it?
There’s ample of evidence for Syria being merely another pawn, soon to be discarded in yet another orgy of violence.
HTS and whoever else is there right now are useful idiots of the neocon warmongers, and I honestly fail to see how they conduct business with the more nefarious and despicable elements of the empire. They surely must know that the tacit support forthcoming from the West will evaporate as soon as HTS has outlived its usefulness.
I suppose that they’ll continue nonetheless, if only because they are militant fanatics. I’ve also read here and there that most of the HTS cadres are paid mercenaries from virtually all the darkest corners of the Islamic world. Once more, the West is (ab)using the worst elements to fight—Russians. It’s like Afghanistan in the 1980s all over again, with the crucial difference of Syria being literally on the West’s doorsteps.
Those who consider this a stable, or even sustainable, situation are either lying to themselves or to everyone else (most likely both).
There’s little sense in this: ‘we’ have spent almost 25 years now (yes, 2001 is that long ago) fighting ‘terrorism™’, and now the West has apparently looked so deeply into that particular abyss that, with the abyss staring back at ‘us’, we’re now literally teaming up with Al Qaeda.
So, why are Western gov’ts doing this?
My take is two-fold: on the primary plane, there must be a strategic, geopolitical aim (the war against Russia), which is manipulated and weaponised by parts of the neocon-Israeli alliance of convenience (hence Israeli support for the lunatics of HTS). I doubt that this support for HTS will go away should Russia withdraw its forces from Syria. We should, I suppose weep and pray for the ordinary Syrians who are suffering and will continue to do so under what is surely one of the worst kinds of regimes imaginable.
Second, the regional ‘instability’ this situation creates reinforces also serves a domestic purpose for Western régimes: it stirs up sentiment among the now-sizeable Moslem populations dwelling in all Western countries, which can be ‘mobilised’ more or less at-will to protest ‘for Syria’ (in London, Paris, Berlin, etc.); frequently, these protests involve calls to create a ‘caliphate’ in Europe:
In Germany and Austria, the sizeable contingents of Turkish origins are also well-organised by expat organisations on terrorist watchlists, such as the Grey Wolves, affiliated with President Erdogan:
What I hear from police officers is that esp. the Grey Wolves are extremely well-organised, funded, and hard to control; they essentially co-exist with police and state offices, creating a kind of parallel structure/society that stands ready to potentially wreak havoc.
What’s the purpose of this? Of course, all of the this is known to Western gov’ts, hence we may deduce their purposes to be an at-the-ready ploy to create chaos and violence on the streets of Western cities, if needed.
When would that be ‘needed’, you may ask? And here’s my tinfoil hat loony conspiracy theory™:
Once the hot phase of the conflict vs. Mordor Russia winds down, all the multi-trillion dollar commitments to the arms manufacturers must be justified. Hence the rabid, seemingly irrational death-wish of EU politicos™ who have propagandised Europeans for years now.
These merchants of death would lose countless trillions of ‘revenues’ should the prospects of fighting recede; as dependent as EU manufacturing is already on the arms manufacturers for keeping up the illusion of economic growth, Brussels cannot backtrack without a severe recession or depression, which its insane ‘Green™’ policies in combination with the likely US aggression vs. Nord Stream/Russia have induced in the first place.
Everybody knows that there’s two things that bring any gov’t/régime down: a lost war and/or severe economic dislocation.
The EU is staring at the combination of both, hence their less-than-sanguine response to the impending evaporation of support; this situation, to me, explains the crack-down on any kind of dissent, perceived or real, in Hungary (Mr. Orbán has long been the Eurocrats’ bête noire), Slovakia, Romania, and soon elsewhere in the EU bloc, too.
The silver lining here, I suppose, is that Brussels has few, if any, means of coercion, hence all they can do is engage in shadow posturing.
The EU is a paper tiger, it is clearly revealed, which is why the Eurocrats are pushing so hard to bring about a top-down revolution and create a super-state as soon as possible, ideally with its own troops.
Those troops, by the way, will never be used in combat vs. other militaries; doing so means casualties (can’t have that as EUrocrat), and since a sizeable contingent of Western men of military age in the various armies is of less-than-reliable stances, it’s obvious to this author that war in the traditional sense of the term isn’t an option.
Given these considerations, any kind of ‘EUropean Army’ will likely be used for ‘domestic™’ purposes, such as the performance of ‘border controls™’ vs ‘illegal migrants’ (which means road blocks on motorways to check the papers of EU ‘citizens™’); the patrolling of streets and railroad stations (already in place in France, Italy, or Sweden), i.e., the normalisation of the military performing police duties; and, of course, the ‘partnering™’ with police forces should mass protests threaten the new régime.
Fellow Europeans, meet your new masters: same as the ones mass protests in the wake of the lost Great War kicked out (the remnants of the Old Regime).
Unlike Feudalism 1.0, though, which was an ecumenical, i.e., all-encompassing, system based on mutual duties and obligations, albeit with massive, structural power imbalances between rulers and ruled, this ‘Feudalism 2.0’ will be very different: under the Old Regime, the propertied classes and status groups shared the population’s Christian values and believes (to certain extents); our new overlords consider themselves our betters and openly despise us.
There’s only one solution here: non-compliance, at every step of the way.