Syria and the Christians

Sir, Paul Richardson’s article on Syria on 28 February was disappointing. His sniping at Russia for intervening in Syria ‘for their own advantage’, besides ignoring the recent selfinterested interventions of Western powers in other Middle Eastern countries for the selfish purposes of petroleum security, fails to appreciate that Russian and Chinese support for the Assad regime in fact best guaranteed that something like fair play towards minority religions such as Christianity has been historically enacted by that political family over recent decades, keeping at bay the destructive terrorism of specifically anti-Christian jihadists.

The imposition by the West of no-fly zones and the armament of rebels, however well-intentioned by Ms Slaughter and Paul, would either have drawn the West once more into another endless morass of military futility, or facilitated a steady supply of arms, inevitably, falling into the hands of real extremists.

Granted that the Assad dynasty came to power in Syria through copiously spilling blood, ten times such barbaric cruelty would have been visited by well-armed contemporary jihadism upon its endless ranks of religio-political enemies.

The promotion of justice and the punishment of wrongdoing would have been better served by theWest’s leaving the dominant Syrian regime, for all its faults, well alone - as Russia, even if accidentally, perceived.

David H Higgins, Bristol