Eastern Ghouta, Assad's Srebrenica

The UN Security Council has at last looked into the inhuman situation unfolding in Eastern Ghouta and, surprisingly, decided that a 30-day ceasefire should come into effect within 72 hours. The surprising part is that Russia, this time, did not veto the draft resolution so as to shield the Syrian regime and turn a blind eye to its massacres.

Unfortunately, in all the crimes against humanity and massacres he has committed in Syria, Assad draws courage from Russia, which holds the veto and protects him under every circumstance. This time, the draft resolution prepared to stop the massacre in Eastern Ghouta, which is described as Assad's Srebrenica, unfolding before the eyes of the world and putting the consciences of its witnesses through the torments of hell, was not blocked by Russia's veto either, and so it was adopted.

In fact, in Astana, with the agreement of all parties, the Eastern Ghouta region had been accepted as a de-escalation zone. Accordingly, the Assad regime's attack on Eastern Ghouta, where the opposition is known to be present already, amounts to a clear violation of this agreement. The Assad regime, which resorts to burning down an entire neighborhood in order to neutralize one armed element, is meanwhile putting its signature to yet another atrocity in the massacre of civilians that tramples humanity underfoot. Within a few days, at least 400 people, most of them children, were killed in air strikes.

The abundant footage of child massacres on the internet exposes in all its ugliness the filth of the war Assad is waging against his own people. Looking at these images, will those who still speak of talking with Assad and opening a new page with him not feel even a little shame?

What account or plan can be made by meeting with Assad? Is he unable to carry by himself the new crimes against humanity he is committing and will commit, so that he must be helped in these crimes? Can he be prevented from committing these crimes by meeting with him? Just look: even within the framework of the understanding reached in Astana with Russia and Iran, who stand by him, these crimes cannot be prevented.

The only thing that will stop Assad is the complete annihilation of those who oppose him. Add to the nearly one million people already dead, the several million wounded, and the refugees who have left the country and number 8 million, the 7 million people displaced inside Syria to avoid becoming the target of his death machines... In total, almost no one is left who has not suffered from the regime's tyranny and has no quarrel with it, apart from a small minority of his own collaborators.

Assad, and those who turn a blind eye to him, are about to arrive at a state almost without a people.

In such a country, with nothing to boast of in their hands other than lethal, destructive force, will Russia and Iran still take pride in maintaining a position against US imperialism or Zionism? Even if there is such a position, will it be defended with Assad?

ASSAD-PYD COOPERATION: WHO IS DECEIVING WHOM?

The very same Assad is currently working together with the PYD-JPG-PKK elements, who are the legionaries of both Zionism and the US in Syria. Against Turkey's Operation Olive Branch, the Shabiha loyal to Assad rushed to Afrin to support the PYD. Moreover, the abandonment of Afrin, Qamishli and Manbij to PYD elements was an event that came about entirely through Assad's plan and approval.

Is there any point now in asking who is deceiving whom?

If there is, let us ask. Should Iran, which supports Assad against the axis of the US and Zionism, not feel deceived by the same Assad's cooperation with the PYD, the legionary organization of the US and Zionism? Or are they all part of some other account that they hide from the world, and are they deceiving the whole world? Whatever kind of game this is, its winner is by no means the anti-Zionist front. On the contrary, Iran's Assad policy, at the end of the day, makes the Zionist camp more comfortable and stronger still. The victims of this policy are children, and humanity.

Under these conditions, unfortunately, even the UN Security Council's resolution constitutes no guarantee against the crimes against humanity that Assad has committed and will commit. With a meaningless question such as whether the massacres unfolding before humanity's eyes in Eastern Ghouta, and the images of children's torn-apart bodies, were carried out with chemical weapons or with ordinary weapons, all this outrage can be shifted into a phase of stalling.

In the days when Obama described the use of chemical weapons as the US's red line, the number of people who had died as a result of Assad's massacres through indiscriminate air bombardment and barrel bombs had already reached three hundred thousand. In the massacre in Eastern Ghouta at that time, in which news spread that Assad had killed people using chemical weapons, at most 1,500 people had died. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, rightly, asked that day this striking question: If there is a massacre whose result is unjust death, indeed mass death, what does it matter what kind of weapon it was carried out with? To blame a regime that has unjustly killed three hundred thousand civilians, women, and children, is one to ask with which weapon it killed them? What kind of conscience, what kind of reason is this?

These days you can find as much footage as you do not wish to see of the massacres taking place in Eastern Ghouta on social media. Those dozens of torn-apart children's bodies lined up side by side are all the handiwork of what are considered conventional murder weapons.

If these images too do not stir the world's conscience, may the hands and the conscience of those who still look for a "chemical weapon" condition wither.