Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime embodies the worst a tyrannical regime can inflict on its people. The only hope for Syrians lies in achieving justice and holding those responsible accountable to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated in the future, and to organize a peaceful power transition to close this long, dark chapter in Syria’s modern history.
For decades, the Syrian regime under Assad has been a symbol of oppression and blatant human rights violations. Since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the regime demonstrated its determination to turn Syria into a horror scene, employing brutal methods to suppress any form of dissent, leading to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.
The human slaughterhouse of Sednaya Prison (an Auschwitz of the region) witnessed daily episodes of an unparalleled horror show. The Assad regime relied on a variety of brutal means to tighten its grip on power. It bombed civilians indiscriminately, launching thousands of airstrikes that devastated cities and towns, targeting schools, hospitals and markets. Perhaps the most horrific of these attacks were those involving chemical weapons, such as in Eastern Ghouta in 2013, where hundreds of civilians – most of them women and children – were killed by sarin gas.
Human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, have documented cases of arbitrary detention and systematic torture in the regime's prisons. The regime also employed siege and starvation policies, blockading cities and towns that slipped out of its control and preventing humanitarian aid from reaching them, causing thousands to die from hunger and lack of medicine.
The Syrian regime was not the sole responsible for this human inferno; it received military and political support from regional and international powers, most notably Iran, which provided significant support through Hezbollah and allied militias, strengthening Assad's hold on power and prolonging the conflict.
Russia also played a pivotal role in tipping the scales in favor of the regime through its direct military intervention in 2015. Russian forces carried out airstrikes primarily targeting opposition-controlled areas under the pretext of “fighting terrorism.”
Despite the enormity of the crimes committed, the international community failed to take decisive steps to end the conflict, settling for condemnation and humanitarian aid that fell short of addressing the scale of the disaster. Former US President Barack Obama's administration played a significant, and arguably complicit, role, enabling the ousted regime to continue its massacres. As chilling images from Sednaya emerge, the world will have to carry this historical shame and burden for its silence over the massacres.
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