Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s president, met with President Emmanuel Macron of France on Wednesday. AntiWar.com recently reported: “Israel Launches Airstrikes Near Syria’s Presidential Palace.” The New York Times reports indirect talks are going on between al-Shara and Israel.
Available for a limited number of interviews:
CHARLES GLASS, [email protected], @charlesmglass
Glass is a noted journalist who has covered the Mideast for decades. His latest book is the just-released Syria: Civil War to Holy War? He recently wrote the piece “Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover” for The Nation.
He writes: “The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend — a friend — threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching.
“The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle fatigues from his years leading Sunni Muslim fundamentalists against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With a trimmed beard and a new suit, he was receiving and visiting fellow heads of state from the Middle East and beyond. An American delegation was so impressed that the US revoked its $10 million bounty on Shara’s head for terrorist crimes. …
“In the group’s previous incarnations as part of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, HTS members rampaged through Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017, showing no respect for ethnic or religious differences. Its militants massacred Alawis, Christians, and Yazidis. The assault on the Yazidis, whose men they slaughtered and whose women they sold into sex slavery, was genocidal by any standard.”
Now, Glass notes “The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the leading organization exposing the Assad regime’s crimes during the civil war, condemned a media campaign to intimidate Alawis: ‘SOHR confirms that the objective of this media campaign is manifested in obliterating evidence of the mass genocide against [Alawis] in the Syrian coastline [to] reshape the genocide [as] a sectarian conflict; this, in turn, reduces potential for blaming ruling authorities for those crimes.’ …
“Three hundred miles south along the Mediterranean shore from Syria’s Alawi heartland, another, larger genocide is underway in Gaza. The perpetrators are allowed to judge themselves, while a quiescent world ignores its obligation under the 1951 Genocide Convention ‘to prevent and to punish’ actions calculated to cause any people’s ‘physical destruction in whole or in part.’”