Italy: blackmailed by all

+ Syria. Evidence of the crimes of the "bloody tyrant" Bashar al-Assad.

Today I am providing my English translation of 2 short articles, both originally in Italian.

The first one is a very short, but intense article by Massimo Mazzucco published on his LuogoComune.net website on Thursday 23rd January 2025. (All emphasis mine).

Italy: blackmailed by all

Libyan police chief Najeem Osema Almasri Habish.

No more than a month after a release that took place under blackmail, that of the Iranian engineer exchanged for Cecilia Sala's return home, a human trafficker, the head of the Libyan judicial police, Almasri, was arrested in Turin on a warrant from the International [Criminal] Court in The Hague, but immediately released and even brought back home on a state flight.

According to the Hague tribunal, Almasri is “suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence”, but we [Italy] released him immediately, because he is evidently part of that secret pact with Libya that no one wants to admit exists: we pay Libyans a lot of money to keep as many migrants as possible in their country, while we turn a blind eye - in this case even two blind eyes - to the absolutely inhuman methods with which migrants are treated in that country.

While we should be publicly condemning Libya for the lagers in which African migrants are detained and tortured, we turn a blind eye and bask in the “positive statistics” that show a reduction in the number of migrants from Libya.

And when we accidentally find the leader of these criminals in our hands, we immediately let him go with any excuse, because we absolutely do not want to irritate the Libyans by whom we are blatantly blackmailed.

Some things make you feel really proud to be Italian.

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The second article, by Maria Morigi, was published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on Thursday 23rd January 2025 too. (All emphasis and footnotes original).

Syria. Evidence of the crimes of the "bloody tyrant" Bashar al-Assad.

The Western press is firing all its humanitarian propaganda bullets. At last, with the legitimisation of the new al Qā'ida + ISIS government, the crimes perpetrated by Assad during the civil war can be freely discussed. The media couldn't wait to rekindle attention on chemical weapons and mass graves. A “posthumous strategy” against the former dictator, since information about the years (2011 to 2017) of the so-called “Syrian Civil War”, which was a consequence of the “Arab Springs” supported and manipulated by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organisation funded by the US Congress, is now in the memory of few people. And today, no one knows the triggers of that war, the real extent of the massacres caused by an improbable number of actors on the ground: armies and armed groups¹, NGOs on the NED payroll and foreign interventionists.

As we know, the Assad regime found support from Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela and the Lebanese Hezbollah, united in considering the Assad family a strategic ally to counter Israeli influence in the region. Instead, for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey - as well as France, the UK and the US - the Syrian conflict was an opportunity to limit Iranian expansionist aims. Hence, it soon happened that the internal civil war, which stemmed from the Arab Spring, became international thanks to the emergence during 2013 of ISIS, which managed to conquer large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, going so far as to proclaim the caliphate in 2014. This led to a “war within a war” against the new common enemy, officially defeated - according to Western propaganda - in late 2017, thanks to the conquest of Raqqa by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the US-backed coalition of Arabs and Kurds.

But let us talk about the massacre of Syrian civilians in the attack carried out on the outskirts of Damascus, in Ghuta (“the oasis”, cultivated land surrounding the city) on 21st August 2013. In order to verify the veracity of the facts and the extent of the massacre (the use of sarin gas was reported), the UN carried out inspections, five days after the attack, at the hospitals where the survivors had been treated and at the sites subjected to the attack. On 16th September 2013, the UN team in charge of verifying the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria delivered its final report to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The 38-page long report confirmed that “chemical weapons have been used relatively widely in the conflict between the two sides in Syria, including against civilians, including children”, but it did not identify the perpetrators, as the investigation by the team led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom was technical, limiting itself to establishing the possible use of chemical weapons, without investigating who used them. The UN inspectors provided “sufficient evidence” of the use of sarin gas in three bombed neighbourhoods of Ghuta, gathering medical, chemical and environmental evidence and establishing that the type of gas was the same as the gas contained in the Syrian stores. However, the experts could not identify who was responsible for the attacks, as many “rebels” (defectors who had joined the Free Syrian Army - FSA) were also able to access the depots. The UN interpretation was not accepted by Russia, which claimed that the evidence was insufficient to prove an involvement of the Syrian regime. Thus, only part of the international community believed in Assad's use of chemical weapons. There was no consensus on the number of victims either. Estimates ranged from 1,729 dead in The Daily Star on 22nd August 2013, to “at least 281” in The Daily Star on 2nd September 2013². On 14th September 2013, an agreement was signed in Geneva between the US and Russia requiring the destruction of chemical weapons in the hands of Syria by June 2014.

The second episode of sarin gas bomb attacks occurred on 4th April 2017, when an air raid on the Khan Shaykhun airbase in north-west Syria, an area controlled by unidentified “rebels”. Among the victims were a high number of children, as reported by journalistic sources and the bombing of some medical facilities. The United States immediately attributed responsibility through the press to the Assad government, which totally denied any involvement. On 7th April, President Donald Trump orders the launch of 59 BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles on the Khan Shaykhun base, but only 23 missiles hit the base, while the other 36 are diverted off target by Syrian radar [sic - electronic warfare/countermeasures, I suppose]. The US raid cost $93.81 million (US Defence Data and AGI-Agenzia Giornalistica Italia, 7 April 2017). So the victims of the 4 April attack must be added to the victims of the 7 April US bombing.

In February 2018, another attack hit Ghuta neighbourhoods, this time without chemical weapons, but with hundreds dead. ‘Goutha, another Srebrenica’ headlines The Guardian from thousands of miles away, “250 killed in Goutha” says BBC remotely.

Goracci [an Italian presstitute] from Istanbul, where he sees nothing, repeats cries of horror and outrage: “Ghouta, bloodbath in the last fort of the anti-Assad rebels” and gives an account of “at least 200 dead, 60 of which children”. The headlines repeat the same words like a mantra, then draw on a single source: the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (of course funded by NED).

In April 2018 in Duma, Ghuta district, the White House after a phone call between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron denounces another chemical gas attack. Both presidents “strongly condemned the horrific attack” and believed that Bashar al Assad should be “held responsible for continued human rights violations”. But then nothing happened, except for inflammatory articles with the same words in every media outlet, nor was any verification done.

Aware that truth is often the victim of politics, we may never know the true extent of these facts, nor who ordered and carried out the massacres in Ghuta (2013 and 2018), the 4th April 2017 massacre in Khan Shaykhun and the 2018 massacre in Duma, but we await the results of the announced expert reports on the mass graves, trusting that they will clarify the responsibilities and crimes of the various actors involved. Yet we know that no one is innocent, least of all those who take advantage of tragedies in order to steer an uncritical, malleable and emotional public opinion, ready to condemn the bloody monster as the version for the press is packaged each time.

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1. There were in fact pro-government militias (Syrian Armed Forces, National Defence Force (NDF) an organism parallel to the regular army, unofficial shabiha militias appearing since 2011 in the repression of the first demonstrations, the Shiite movement Hezbollah, other numerous foreign Shiite militias from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Palestinian Resistance Front). Then we have the anti-government militias (Free Syrian Army FSA, the largest and best-equipped opposition force based in Turkey composed of defectors from the Syrian Armed Forces, a galaxy of so-called “rebels” including jihadist groups - Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham - ISIS - and Islamic-based groups - Kurdish armed groups).

2. If the higher figures were confirmed (but they were never confirmed), the chemical attack in Damascus would be the most serious since the attack in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Iran-Iraq war when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi army in the town of Halabja (16th March 1988).