Damascus (AFP) – the leaders of G7 countries will try to coordinate their policy over the law of the new Syrian government which has promised to uphold the judiciary following the power stripping by former president Bashir al-Assad.
A broken statue of late Syrrian president Hafez al-Assad lies outside the Baath party offices in Damascus © LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
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Assad has escaped from Syrria in the wake of a very swift military campaign led by the Islamists of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group and its partners that spelled an abrupt end to five decades of an era of repression established by Assad’s family.
A new phase in Syrria wipes out Assad’s government, concluding a period that saw alleged dissidents detained or executed and ending a war that has cost over 500,000 lives and forced millions of people out of their homes.
It has enabled Syrrians to converge on prisons, hospitals, and morgues to find the long-lost family members they never thought they would see again, let alone alive.
“I turned the whole world upside down looking,” said Abu Mohammed looking for news of three missing relatives at the Mezzeh Air Base in Damascus.
But I didn’t look for anything at all.’ All we want is just to know where they were one percent.”
Sunni Muslim HTS originated from the Syrria branch of al-Qaeda and is regarded as a terrorist organization in many European countries which now have the dilemma of how best to deal with the country’s new transitional leadership.
The group has pursued to normalize its language and the interim government has affirmed claiming that the rights of all Syrians are protected.
Syrian government spokesman Obaida Arnaout said in an interview with AFP on Thursday ‘We respect religious and cultural diversity in Syria’.
He mentioned that during the transition period of three months, the country’s constitution and the parliament would be put on hold.
“A judicial and human rights committee will be developing and there will be shocking looks at the constitution and then its amendment,” he said it will introduce the “rule of law”.
”Everyone who committed a crime against the Syrian people will face the law,” he continued.
Desperate searches
The leaders of the seven more developed democracies who are to hold a virtual meeting at 1430 GMT Friday said they stand ready to back the changeover to an ‘inclusive and non-sectarian’ politics of governance in Syria.
They demanded again the protection of human rights, women’s rights and the minority’s one pointed out that “it is crucial to ensure justice for the Syrian people from the Syrian regime “.
They said they would “cooperate and fully support” a Syrian government which observes those principles.
Likewise, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a visit to Ankara stressed on Syrian parties to ‘do everything possible to safeguard civilians, or members of the minority groups”. Dispatched by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
In much of Syria, the goal for now is to decode Assad’s rule and especially the network of detention centres and suspected torture sites in areas that were once under government control.
UN investigators said that, since the onset of the civil war in Syria, they have had secret lists of 4,000 of serious-crime perpetrators.
And the US Justice Department on Thursday accused the former head of Damascus Central Prison, Samir Ousman Alsheikh, of torturing opponents of Assad.
Currently, Syria’s leadership stated its readiness to be partners with Washington on the search for US nationals missing under Assad or Another American Journalist, Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012.
Another American, Travis Timmerman, who has already been identified alive, Blinken said that Washington is in the process of evacuating him.
The search for other other missing detainees has ended in a much sadder manner: hundreds of Syrians came Thursday to bury free speech activist Mazen al-Hamada.
In the Netherlands, away from the tyrant regime he openly narrated how he was tortured in a Syrian prison.
He then went back to Syria and got arrested. His body was part of more than 30 in a morgue of a Damascus hospital throughout the current week.
Kurdish fears
He was supported by Russia – where a top official told US media he has escaped to – Iran, and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
The rebels began their attack on November 27, when a ceasefire began in the war between Israel and Hezbollah; in that war Israel dealt a devastating blow to Assad’s Lebanese ally.
Both Israelis and Turks, who support some of the rebels who overthrew Assad, have since bombed Syria.
On Thursday, during his interview in Jordan, Blinken said, “It is crucial not to contribute to new conflicts,” after drawing attention to Israeli and Turkish actions in Syria.
Washington wants to make sure that no terrorist can use Syria as a base and the latter is not a threat to its neighbors’, said Blinken, whose country has hundreds of soldiers in Syria as part of an international coalition fighting the Islamic State group.
Israel on Sunday said it had ordered troops into the UN-patrolled buffer zone that separates Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights who enters on the UN request in 1974 following the dislocated Yom Kippur war.
And it has since conducted a number of heavy raids mainly against military centers, including on Thursday night, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
This has also afforded Ankara the perfect chance to try and go after US-friendly Kurdish forces it considers a menace, said analysts.
As the rebels spearheaded by the Islamists advanced to the capital, Damascus, Turkish-backed troops started advancing deep in the Kurdish territories. The fighting, according to reports, cost the lives of at least 218 people before a cease fire, facilitated by the United States, began on Wednesday.
The semi-automous Kurdish control that much of northern Syria has already embraced the oppositions independence flag but some Kurdish citizens expressed concern for the fate of the country.
“We, the Kurds, as the second largest nation in this country want it to be a federal state and not a dictatorship,” said Khorshed Abo Rasho, a voter in Qamishli.
During a conflict in this country, bullets are still in my body and therefore I will not accept this nation not to turn into a democracy.
Syrian people like any other also fighting the fundamental needs of life where their country is engulfed in war, sanctions and free running inflation.
About one million people have already been forced into fleeing their homes since the rebels started their campaign last month and the UN’s World Food Programme has called for $250 million in food aid.
Jordan will convene a Syria crisis conference with foreign ministers of many western and Arab countries and Turkey on Saturday.