On Monday, the U.S. State Department accused Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad of using a crematorium outside of the capital Damascus to dispose of the bodies of thousands of prisoners. Thousands have gone missing since the start of the 2011 Syrian civil war-turned-genocide. Anti-Assad forces on the ground, including the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have accused the regime of getting rid of the bodies of the missing by burning them to a crisp. These allegations have mostly fallen on deaf ears.
we said that years ago, but no body believed us
Syria using crematorium to hide executions, State Department says https://t.co/hxCoLhZUmu pic.twitter.com/cvERgKRb3b— Asaad Hanna (@AsaadHannaa) May 15, 2017
But now the Trump administration is vindicating those who have long accused the butcher of Damascus of doing unspeakable things to his people.
According to the State Department, Assad built a large crematorium beside the Saydnaya Military Prison, the regime’s notorious detention facility. Saydnaya is just a 45-minute drive from Damascus. There, regime officers allegedly burned the bodies of thousands of prisoners to cover-up war crimes.
“Although the regime’s many atrocities are well-documented, we believe the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass atrocities taking place in Saydnaya prison,” said Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department. “We are appalled by the atrocities taking place in Syria [with the] seemingly unconditional support of Russia.”
Declassified intelligence, including photographs and satellite images, reveal not the only the barbarity of the Assad regime but the complicity of patron state Russia.
The “photos underscore the depths to which the Syrian regime has gone with the support of … Russia,” Jones asserted.
According to Jones, the regime may be executing as many as 50 prisoners a day at the Saydnaya military prison. The bodies of the executed are then taken to the crematorium nearby to be burned.
“In February, Amnesty International alleged that thousands of people have been hanged at the Syrian prison just 45 minutes outside the capital of Damascus in a secret crackdown on dissent,” reports CNN. “Amnesty’s report, Human Slaughterhouse, said prisoners are moved in the middle of the night from their cells under the pretext of being transferred. They are taken to the grounds of the prison, where they are hanged, likely unaware of their fate until they feel the noose around their neck, Amnesty alleged.”
The crematorium where prisoner bodies are being incinerated was built after 2013, according to aerial photos obtained by the United States.
The State Department has come to its conclusion through a variety of vetted sources, including press reporting (local, dissident, and international), reports by U.S. intelligence assets, and reports compiled by non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.
The State Department’s accusations against Assad come just one week after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“The Russian government and Minister Lavrov have indicated to us that they’re interested in finding a solution…[but] there is no solution without an end to these atrocities,” Jones added. “We’re not going to signal what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do,” Jones said, but he added that the US would “bring evidence forward to the international community.”
But unlike the Obama administration, which doubled-down on failed, and quite frankly naïve, diplomacy with the Russians, the Trump administration has shown its willingness to respond to Assad’s grotesque violations of international law. Last month, Trump authorized CENTCOM to launch 59 tomahawk missiles at al-Sharyat air field, destroying hangers, equipment, and aircraft.
The attack was relatively small in scale. In fact, the Russians were notified about the precision strikes before they occurred in order to avoid the possibility of dead Russian soldiers and a larger geopolitical quagmire. Nonetheless, the offensive, justified as a response to the human rights crisis in Syria, marked a major shift in the president’s thinking. During the presidential campaign, Trump signaled a strong preference to stay out of the conflict in Syria in the hopes of working with the Russians, and perhaps even Assad, to target ISIS. The problem, of course, was that neither the Russians nor the Syrian regime were going after ISIS. In many ways, the regime has a symbiotic relationship with ISIS.
Not only did ISIS begin as an offshoot of al-Qaida in Syria, but it flourished in the wake of Assad’s extermination of a fragmented and under-armed Syrian opposition.
As the Obama administration abandoned anti-Assad allies, including the Free Syrian Army, ISIS gobbled up defectors from the Syrian opposition, exploiting the war against the Shiite Iranian-backed Alawite regime in Damascus to recruit countless Sunni “holy warriors.”
The Islamic State’s successes in Syria led to more more manpower and more territory. IS fighters eventually took over vast swaths of land in Syria’s oil-rich northern territories, ensuring a consistent flow of income from black market petrol sales to fund its terror operations abroad.
The fact is, the Obama Doctrine is responsible for both the emergence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq and the continued atrocities of the Assad regime.
Since 2011, Assad has been butchering his own people, and the Obama administration did nothing to take his bloody hands away from the levers of power. This failure to act wasn’t just moral cowardice but strategic idiocy.
Like Rwanda before it, Syria will be studied for years as an exercise in collective inaction. https://t.co/T92g8r5nz0
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) May 15, 2017
Under the banner of American apologetics and prostration, the Obama administration abandoned key strategic U.S. allies on the ground, exacerbating a political vacuum that has already seen the emergence of Sunni jihadist factions like ISIS and the al-Nusra front. The disastrously ineffectual $500 million Pentagon program to train and equip allied fighters against the Assad regime failed to yield any results. Only “four to five” militants were prepared for the project.
The discursive nature of U.S. policy in the post-Iraq invasion of the Middle East damaged both U.S. assets on the ground and the stability of the region as a whole. With Arab analysts suggesting that President Obama was “checkmated” by Putin, the Obama doctrine was synonymous with incomprehensibility.
As Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group (a leading global political risk research and consulting firm), stated, “Barack Obama’s painfully public vacillation on what to do with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad marks the low point of his six years in office.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” confessed Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker in October of 2015, “We are getting to a place where there are little, if any, option left. This administration has frittered away most opportunities — to the point that they’re not going to be in direct with Russia, and Russia knows that.”
A Cold-War style showdown with Russia is not in anybody’s best interest. Mutually Assured Destruction is still the operative phrase.
Former President Obama has left the United States with very few logistically plausible options.
Today, Syria is hell on earth. Over half a million people have been killed in Assad’s slaughterhouse. Several million have been turned into refugees, forced to cross treacherous seas and pay off human smugglers to cross into countries that either don’t want them, pity them, or outright infantilize them in a way that only far-left, paternalistic Westerners with martyr complexes and Orientalist fetishists could do.
But nonetheless, those who managed to escape the aerial bombings, mass rape, torture, chemical weapons attacks, arbitrary detentions, and crematoriums are the lucky ones
As The New Yorker’s Ben Taub noted in a powerful essay published last August, nobody, most of all Bashar al-Assad, is afraid of international law anymore.
“Nowhere has the supposed deterrent of eventual justice proved so visibly ineffective as in Syria…since 2011, not a minute has passed in which the Syrian government has not been committing multiple, simultaneous, widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he writes. “The body of court-ready evidence against top officials within the Syrian government is more complete and damning than any that has ever previously been collected during an active conflict. And yet there is no clear path for prosecuting the highest-level offenders.”
Taub continues:
The most incriminating evidence was produced by the regime’s own immense bureaucracy. Military police officers have systematically processed and photographed the emaciated corpses of thousands of detainees who were tortured to death by security and intelligence agents; more than fifty thousand of these images are currently in the possession of international lawyers and forensic investigators. And, as I have previously written for this magazine, independent war-crimes investigators working for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability have smuggled out of Syria more than six hundred thousand government files, allowing them to trace the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of suspected members of the opposition to orders emanating from President Bashar al-Assad’s highest-level security committee, and approved by Assad himself….
If the [International Criminal Court] were permitted to investigate war crimes in Syria, it would be unsurprising to see future prosecutions of top officials—including Assad—for an array of crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, including willful killing; wanton and excessive destruction of property beyond military necessity; compelling prisoners of war to fight on behalf of their captors; intentional attacks directed against civilians; intentional attacks directed against humanitarian personnel, installations, and vehicles; bombardment of undefended towns, villages, or buildings; murdering prisoners of war; intentionally attacking markets, schools, and hospitals; mutilation; pillaging; the use of chemical weapons, including “asphyxiating gases”; and intentionally starving civilians as a method of warfare, while willfully impeding relief supplies.
With Russia now actively participating in Assad’s air campaign—using banned incendiary munitions and frequently bombing hospitals and markets in rebel-held territory on his behalf—the likelihood that the U.N. Security Council might eventually refer jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court has dropped to approximately zero per cent.
Taub’s conclusion is as heart-wrenching as at is true.
“The Syrian war has become a conflict in which war crimes carry no consequences—present or, seemingly, future—and in which their perpetration has been normalized as a part of military strategy, rather than being seen as an aberration,” he laments. “Western countries and the United Nations have spent the past five and a half years condemning atrocity after atrocity in Syria, to no avail. With justice so limited by geopolitics, who in Syria is afraid of international law?”
The people of Syria have come to know death as a daily messenger. After losing wives to barrel bombs, husbands to firing squads, children to chlorine and sarin gas, some call upon the angel of death for mercy, begging that he take them with him, too.
It’s unclear how the Trump administration will move going forward. Trump himself has sent mixed signals about Russia, claiming on one hand that Vladimir Putin can be a valuable anti-terror ally while dispatching administration officials to make strong accusations against Russia and its patronage of Assad’s hellish war-machine.
Trump has shown the world that he can respond to Assad’s barbarism. Now with hard evidence of Assad’s prisoner-burning crematoriums in hand, will Trump send another message to the butcher-incinerator of Damascus once more or smirk and extend a diplomatic hand to Russia, hoping that an amoral patron of death will experience a spontaneous change of heart?