Something is being forgotten, or consciously repressed about Iran’s deeds under the leadership of ayatollah Khamenei. Especially amongst those many on the anti-Zionist-left and the openly antisemitic Tucker Carlson/ Candace Owens-right, who spread the genocide libel against Israel in hopes of destroying it, while fiercely attacking the war against the Iranian regime. Iran, under Khamenei, is largely responsible for the actual genocide of half a million Sunni Muslims in Syria, as well as the displacement of several million others. 

The erasure of Iran and Khamenei’s role in the genocide is evident not only amongst the crazy fringes, but in the mainstream press as well. The Washington Post’s obituary of Khamenei ignores it completely. In the New York Times’ obituary of Khamenei, his role in Syria is mentioned, but not connected with the mass murder of civilians. Instead the NY Times writes that the ayatollah “sent militia forces into Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad against Western backed rebels and Sunni jihadists.” 

Help for Assad against jihadis sounds reasonable. But the majority of Sunni Muslim deaths in Syria were civilians or political prisoners. According to a 2018 report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 104,000 political prisoners were executed in cold blood by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In 2017, Amnesty International published a report which stated that between 2011 and 2015 the Syrian government had murdered an estimated 13,000 people, mostly civilians, at the Saydnaya military prison alone (the United States later discovered a crematorium just outside the prison that was used for burning the bodies).

What does this have to do with Iran? The Iranians were not just allied with Syria’s Assad — they were more like his big brother. Destroying the Sunnis in Syria was part of Iran’s master plan — hatched by General Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated in January 2020 — for creating a Shiite arc that stretches from Iran through Lebanon. “Without us, Bashar would not have survived,” claimed Ali Akbar Velayati, the international affairs adviser to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, in November 2017.

The extent of Iran’s support for the murderous Assad regime bears Velayati’s statement out. Iran did not just fund and arm the Assad regime — they were boots on the ground, an essential part of the killing machine. In July 2012, I interviewed a Syrian commander who had fled to Jordan after being ordered to kill “five percent” of the peaceful demonstrators against the Assad regime — 50 per thousand demonstrators. He gave me documents ordering his troops and others to protect the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, and other assorted Shiite fighters who were already in Syria at this early stage of the civil war. Iran sent  regular army ground troops as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fight for Assad. It funded  and ordered the movement of thousands of Hezbollah troops into Syria from across the border in Lebanon. And it brought thousands more Shiite fighters, including Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis, into Syria — estimates range from 15 thousand  to many more. 

Even more importantly, Iran sent many of its top officers to command troops in Syria while the mass murder of Syrian civilians was going full force. Ten Iranian brigadier generals died in combat in Syria during eight years of fighting — a startling measure of the extent to which this genocidal war, in which 90 percent of civilian deaths are estimated to have been committed by pro-Assad forces — was prosecuted through an Iranian command. And since 2014 — after the Iran deal unfroze the country’s financial assets, Iran spent billions of dollars funding Syria’s war machine, changing the course of the war.

Ignoring Iran’s role in the Syrian genocide is convenient for those who wish to brand the United States’ and Israel’s attack on the regime as immoral and illegal. Beyond that, it is an inconvenient truth for the many spreading the genocide libel against Israel. Since Iran funded and armed Hamas, including throughout its long preparation for the October 7th attack, ignoring Iran’s critical role in the Syrian civil war serves the interest of those who wish to downplay Hamas’s genocidal ideology and that of its patron. The obsession with portraying Israel’s necessary war against Hamas as a genocide, an inevitable conclusion to Israel’s birth in sin as a “settler colonial state” practicing “apartheid” might suffer or be upstaged. It might be harder to see Hamas’s genocidal ideology and mass murder of Israeli citizens as “resistance” if its patron, Iran, participated in a genocide of civilians many times larger than the Gaza casualty count. Israel’s legitimate fears, having witnessed a genocide right across its Northern border, might be better understood. 

Beyond all that, the extent of the Islamic regime’s evildoing must be remembered at this moment. It should steel our resolve to support the war until the remnants of this regime are crushed, and the long-suffering, brave Iranian people can renew their sovereignty and their civilization

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)