The Assads, father and son, always claimed to be the defenders of the Palestinians against the Zionist entity. The truth is quite otherwise. More on how the Assads used and abused the Palestinians can be found here: “For Palestinians, Syria is a closing door and an opening window – analysis,” by Elias Zananiri, The Media Line, December 16, 2024:
The Syrian regime under Hafez Assad and his son, Bashar, had always been a puzzle for the Palestinians. They couldn’t figure out if it was a regime they loved to hate or they hated to love.
Although Syria had the chance to play a pivotal role in the region, it focused on fighting the Palestinians a lot more than the effort it made to fight Israel, the perceived occupier of the Palestinian people. Ask any Palestinian about the Syrian regime under the father and later his son, and he will immediately tell you it never shot a bullet at Israel after the 1973 October War. For the Palestinian majority, this is not only an indication but damning evidence that Syria was not on the side of the Palestinian national rights.
The Syrian regime offered lots of lip service to the Palestinians. Still, it spared no effort to take over the PLO and turn it into a Syrian proxy, like Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and Zuheir Mohsen’s As-Sa’iqa, Arabic for thunderbolt. Most Palestinians in Syria knew these two as senior officers in the country’s secret service….
The story of Bashar Sharif Ali Saleh, a Palestinian from the West Bank city of Jenin, illustrates how ruthless Jibril’s personality was.
Bashar was released upon the collapse of the Assad regime after spending 40 years in Syrian jails because Ahmad Jibril considered him a person of interest. In an interview with him at the Palestinian embassy in Damascus after his release, Bashar said he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian territories -General Command, PFLP-GC, whose leader then was Ahmad Jibril.
One day, Bashar and a few volunteers were sitting in a room when Jibril suddenly entered. Everybody rose except for Bashar. “I know it was a mistake that I didn’t stand up, and instead, I shook Jibril’s hand while seated,” Bashar said.
Bashar Sharif Ali Saleh spent more than 12 years in Sednaya Prison because he had failed to stand up when Ahmed Jibril, the head of Syrian-allied PFLP, entered the room. It is that kind of detail that conveys the full horror of the Assad regime and its Palestinian allies.
Walid Barakat is a Palestinian who flew to Damascus in 1982 to enroll in one of its universities. He was arrested upon arrival and sent to three different prisons until he was taken to Sednaya Prison in 2001, where he stayed until his release after HTS combatants stormed Damascus. He couldn’t even tell why he was arrested….
The Assad regime would arrest and imprison Palestinians at will; no reason was ever given for most of these sentences. Anyone perceived as a threat to the regime would be immediately picked up. Did Walid Barakat let slip some anti-regime sentiment before he went to Damascus, that an Assad agent overheard and reported, and Barakat spent 42 years of his life in prison as a result?
Assad was not interested in the Palestinians except insofar as he could use some of them, under his threat, to help maintain Syrian control of Lebanon. He “never fired a shot” against Israel.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader, expressed his belief that Syria needs to democratize all its institutions. Known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, al-Sharaa told a Syrian television channel that many domestic issues in Syria need urgent treatment and solutions. Therefore, he added, the leaders of the new regime are not out there to fight Israel.
“We want the Iranian presence in Syria to end so Israel would have no more excuses to attack Syria,” he said. He sounded more like a leftist rather than an Islamist as he reasonably discussed the future he expects for Syria. He said, “Syria needs a transformation from the mentality of revolting against the tyranny of Assad’s regime into a state mentality where issues must be dealt with collectively and in cooperation with all segments of the society.”
Since he quit al-Qaida, al-Sharaa has done his homework correctly. He dropped his nom de guerre and preferred to be called by his real name. He also removed his al-Qaida camouflage, as he understood that it would not encourage the Syrian public to support him and his group. Modernizing Syrian governance is genuinely needed, and al-Sharaa is convinced that he and his colleagues in the new country’s command must follow this line.
It’s hard to know if al-Sharaa’s claim to have abandoned the jihadist beliefs he held for so long is sincere. Right now he is so focused on three things: first, persuading the West to lift its sanctions on Syria; second, having the West remove the designation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization; third, having the West supply aid so that Syria can start to rebuild. He is willing to say anything that will further those goals. No one seems to know if he can be trusted; the Israelis, quite rightly, are acting on the assumption that he cannot, and the IDF is determined to deprive Syria of its military assets through a campaign of sustained bombing that has already reduced those assets to 20% of what they were just a few weeks ago. Now Syria has been stripped of the wherewithal to harm the Jewish state.
It is uncertain if Syria will become a Western-style democracy. Only time can tell if Syria is moving in that direction. From a Palestinian perspective, it is better to have a neutral Syria than a country that proclaims to support the Palestinian national struggle while it does nothing. A senior Fatah member who graduated in Syria and spent most of his years in the country said he would prefer to see Syria sitting on the fence watching what happens in the region to a Syria that stabs the Palestinian people in their back. He added that Syria “is a closing door and an opening window.”
“We hope it will be a window of positive and fruitful change in a country that deserves to live in a democratic regime honoring human rights and individual liberties.”
As De Gaulle skeptically said on another occasion, “Vaste programme, monsieur.”
Hamish says
So, a life long determined Muslim terrorist is on the floor and we have our foot on his windpipe. He says “I’ve decided to become a peace loving Quaker; take your foot off my neck, give me water, food and money, hand me my machine gun, and you will see how peace loving I really am.”
Have I got a bridge to sell you.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I recall in the 80s, during the Israel war in Lebanon, when Arafat was in Damascus to discuss the war w/ Hafez al-Assad. Some disagreement arose b/w them, and Arafat was instantly expelled from Damascus. The only country that would have him and the PLO was Tunisia, so that was where they all fled. Israel was pretty peaceful for that brief period b/w then and the Oslo Accords
But yeah, the Assads – particularly the father – had no use for the Palis, other than to use them as an extension of the Syrian army in Lebanon. In fact, not just the Palis – the Assads were never liked by the Arabs in general b’cos of their support to Iran during the 80’s Iran-Iraq war, and probably also for the fact that they were Alawites, which were only acknowledged as islamic by an Iranian Twelver cleric. Otherwise, in 1970, Hafez al-Assad was willing to remove from the Syrian constitution a provision that the president had to be a muslim, but once this fatwa came down from that cleric, he let it remain
As for
al Golani/JolaniAhmad al-Sharaa, it remains to be seen whether he’ll be a Gadaffi or an Akhundzada (the Taliban head honcho). If one remembers, after the 1983 bombing of Tripoli & Benghazi, which nearly took him out, Gadaffi cleaned up his act, and after the Iraq war, turned over Libya’s WMD. So far, al-Sharaa has been fortunate: his army is intact, his patron Turkey is still the leading power in the region, not including Israel, so one wonders whether he’s already absorbed those lessons after observing what happened to AssadIf the west wants to ensure that he behaves, there is only one real way of enforcing it. Not by using carrots or sticks w/ the HTS itself, but rather, putting Turkey in the crosshairs. If Erdogan knows that there’ll be hell to pay if he continues misbehaving, as he has over the last decade, it may persuade him to ensure that HTS is making those changes for real, as opposed to just a PR ploy to get Western sanctions removed plus aid. In the meantime, it’s good that Syria has been totally demilitarized. The same thing needs to happen to Lebanon as well
Mick says
Great post. Maybe the West should (continue to) support Syrian Xians, Kurds and Alawites against Turkey / HTS and reinforce French/ Indian defence of Armenians against Turks/ Azeris/ Israel.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Israel is not an ally of the Turks. In fact, this Turkish exercise in Syria will more likely than not bring Turkey directly into conflict w/ Israel