Given that Iran’s leaders always try to portray themselves as the symbol of moral values, many in Iran and elsewhere expected them to act – or at least speak – against the heinous activities of Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad and his loyalists. Iranian leadership instead chose to side with the longtime ally Assad, like reported by ekurd.net.
It is not just in Syria where Iran has lost the battle for moral high ground, but Iran has also lost this battle in Iraq where Iran-backed Iraqi militias along with Hezbollah had committed mass crimes against the minorities.
Hamza Al-Khateeb, the 13-Years-Old Boy
The mukhabarat is the secret police of Syrian dictator Bashar-al-Assad and is infamous for brutally killing citizens after unlawfully abducting them. The members of this secret police had cut off the penis of a 13-years-old boy, named Hamza Al-Khateeb, in 2011 – perhaps because of their fury against the Syrian people who took to the streets to protest against the tyranny of Bashar-al-Assad and to liberate their homeland from Assad’s decades-long dictatorship.
With his swollen, purple and disfigured head, Hamza’s body was returned to his family. His body was full of marks, cigarette burns, wounds from bullets, kneecaps smashed, neck broken and jaw shattered. After a video of his tortured-body was posted on YouTube, thousands of Syrians rallied and chanted “We Are All Hamza!”.
The boy was among hundreds of children and teenagers who faced the same fate at the hands of Assad’s police and army, though it was the boy’s story that attracted more coverage during the time from the mainstream media.
Many in Iran and elsewhere expected Iran’s leaders to act – or at least speak – against the heinous activities of Assad and his loyalists. However, instead of speaking for the slain victims, Iran’s leaders chose to side with their longtime ally Assad.
Horror, Terror, Death
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian leadership’s military arm, had led the campaign of killing the Sunnis and non-twelver Shias in thousands to depopulate many Syrian and Iraqi areas from Sunnis and non-twelver Shias – something which is no less than genocide.
This fear of being killed for their sectarian identities had compelled a portion of the remaining Sunni and non-twelver Shia population to leave their homeland and seek refuge in other Arab and European countries so that they could escape the genocide. Compelling these people out of their native land, and in some places actively driving them out from their native areas, is something which amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Two clear examples of these IRGC-led campaigns are the sectarian killing and cleansing in Iraq’s Fallujah and Samarra.
In Fallujah, the Iraqi forces and Iran-backed militias killed thousands of innocent Sunnis in the cover of “liberating” the area from ISIS. In the areas around Iraqi city of Samarra too, the Sunnis were driven out with the intention to create a Sunni-free corridor.
All of the above said killing campaigns had been monitored, aided, funded and managed in the ground-zero by the by the Quds Force, which is responsible for carrying out the IRGC’s campaigns outside Iran.
In Syria, the IRGC had carried out the campaign with the help from Assad’s army and Iran-backed Lebanese militant group named Hezbollah. In Iraq, the IRGC had carried out the campaign with the help of sectarian elements in Iraqi army, Iran-backed militias and Hezbollah.
Although, for years, the IRGC has been training the terrorist proxies in a number of regional countries, the IRGC-members went a step further in the recent times to directly engage themselves to the killings of innocent civilians in Syria and Iraq based on sectarian identities.
Worth noting that every mainstream global media had either published articles or broadcasted the footages of the aftermath of the repeated gas/chemical attacks on Syrian civilians carried out by the Bashar-al-Assad’s air force in rebel-held areas.
Assad could certainly not have ordered to carryout these attacks without the backing from the IRGC and without Iranian leadership’s endorsement. The broadcasted-footages clearly show how these attacks killed civilians, especially the children, who had to go through enormous sufferings and pain before ultimately taking their lives.
Designating IRGC as “Terrorist”
IRGC’s support for the spread of terrorist proxies across the Middle East and its support behind the mass killing and cleansing in Syria and Iraq had left the USA with no option but to designate it as a foreign terrorist organization or FTO.
Although the designation had prompted a heated debate on whether or not the decision was a sensible one, all the atrocities committed directly or indirectly by the IRGC suggest that the decision was not an unmerited one.
