‘France, Britain and US want to regain prestige with Syria strikes’
Madrid: Far from “saving Syrians from brutality”, the United States, France and Britain were likely only trying to regain international “prestige” when they attacked Bashar ALASSAD’s regime, prominent Syrian dissident Yassin al Haj Saleh said.
The three countries launched missile strikes against suspected chemical weapons development and storage sites in Syria on Saturday in response to an alleged chemical attack in the town of Douma, which killed at least 40 people.
French President Emmanuel Macron himself recognised that the airstrikes didn’t “necessarily resolve anything” in a civil war that has lasted for seven years, leaving more than 350,000 people dead and millions displaced.
Macron said the strikes aimed to defend “the honour of the international community” in the face of Syria’s suspected violation of the UN Chemical Weapons Convention.
“It’s not about us, it’s not about protecting our lives and saving Syrians from brutality,” Yassin said in Madrid this week, promoting the Spanish translation of his book The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy.
He added that they “want to protect their allies, to regain some of their prestige, to express their anger towards the Russians and even more the Iranians” – the foreign allies of the Assad regime.
“I think the moral of the strikes is ‘be polite, don’t trespass (on) our red lines and you’ll stay in power’,” said the 57-year-old author.
“We don’t have problems with you, we have problems with your using chemical weapons, but go on killing with barrel bombs, under torture and so many other means.”
Yassin was in jail in Syria from 1980 to 1996 for his opposition to then-president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father.
He managed to flee Syria in 2013, and is currently working as a researcher for Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study where he analyses mass atrocity crimes.
His wife Samira Khalil is a human rights defender who was abducted in Douma along with three others by unidentified assailants in December 2013, none of whom has been seen since. — AFP