Syria’s new political order is being presented as a clean break with dictatorship, while the history of Islamist armed groups, foreign intervention and the destruction of the Syrian state is pushed aside.

The rewriting of Syrian history needs to be stopped before it goes any further. Grotesquely, Bashar al Assad has just been sentenced to death by a regime born of Al Qaida and Islamic State clones committing the worst crimes on the planet before they exchanged their takfiri robes for suits and ties.

Until his elevation into the presidential palace in Damascus, Ahmad al Shara’a – then Abu Muhammad al Jolani – was a senior figure in Al Qaida. He then founded Jabhat al Nusra, followed by Haya’t Tahrir al Sham, a collective of takfiri groups welded together by force under Jolani’s command. They were all designated as terrorist groups by the UN and most governments.

The crimes of the takfiris include massacres, beheadings, the murder of Christian clerics and of imams in their mosques, the bombing of markets, the murder of homosexuals by throwing them off rooftops, the burning alive or drowning of captives in swimming pools, the abduction, sale and rape of women, the murder of children and the targeted slaughter of heterodox Muslims such as the Alawis.

Neither should the ‘false flag’ chemical weapons attacks be left out. The current rewriting of history throws these terrible atrocities into the memory hole, but the history was being distorted by the media even as it was happening. The ‘rebels’ could float any lie, no matter how unlikely, for the media to snap it up as truth.

Syria was a secular state. The takfiris wanted to replace it with an extreme shari’a state, and backed by the wealth of the Gulf states and the arms and logistical........

© Pearls and Irritations