If only they would not get in the way

The crisis in Syria has dragged on far longer than expected for both sides. Frankly, when the crisis began, although not at the speed seen in the other Arab Spring countries, there was an expectation that the Assad regime could fall within a comparable period. Today, even though the regime as a regime has in fact completely collapsed and its fighting forces are squeezed into a very narrow area, its capacity to spew death on the people with the heavy weapons it still holds has not been completely neutralized.

That the regime has collapsed as a regime, that is, in its quality as a legitimate state, does not mean it cannot carry out mass killings with the weapons in its hands. Although the Baath gang's power is far from providing the legitimacy and rightfulness a state needs in order to stand before its own people, it still seems sufficient for Russia and Iran, who continue to support it, not to give up hope in it as a last breath of life.

On the other hand, it is evident that neither the regime nor the international powers had predicted that the opposition would prove so resilient, and that it would build an alternative army and state and sustain the resistance this long. At the outset Assad fell into the delusion that, as his father had done many times before, he could suppress the whole opposition by killing a few hundred people.

Frankly, the only reason the opposition, whose background everyone was curious about, grew to these dimensions and became even more persistent was none other than Assad's massacres. What brought about the end of Assad and his regime was nothing but their own self-fulfilling prophecies, set in motion by their own fears and defensive reflexes.

There is no point in being surprised at this and playing ignorant. History is full of cautionary tales of similar ends of such bloody-handed dictators. Not even Pharaoh's end was brought about by some outside power, nor by his people waking up overnight and deciding to rise up. Pharaoh was, before anything else, the victim of the unthinkable measures, massacres and unheeding policies of violence that he adopted in order to protect his own power.

There is one thing that those who keep trying to explain the Syrian revolution with the plots of outside powers should know: the Syrian people, who are today waging a struggle for freedom, have no reason for war other than protecting their own honor, and no helper other than their own determination and effort. Neither America, nor Europe, nor the Gulf countries. Everyone is occupied with their own troubles, their own calculations. America's pretext of uncertainty after Assad increasingly exposes, in all its nakedness, its alliance with Assad.

It would be fitting today to recall and examine in all its details the relationship of the US with Assad and the Baath regime, which exists largely because of Israel. The US has no wish to see Assad overthrown in Syria.

At the International Syria Conference organized in Istanbul at the weekend by the Union of NGOs of the Islamic World, an audience member asked whether the support requested from the US for Syria is wanted to give rise to a new Iraq, or whether the demands or criticisms of Syria's friends in this direction are aimed at creating a ground of legitimacy for the US to occupy Syria in a manner similar to Iraq. Since the question is frequently voiced, it requires once more to be answered in all clarity.

First of all, those who want silence not to be kept on Syria do not endorse the occupation of Iraq. Nor do these circles want or expect the US to come and settle in Syria or occupy it as in Iraq. Comparing Syria with Iraq is a great injustice. If it must be compared at all, Syria's situation should be compared with Bosnia. In Bosnia a NATO intervention was demanded, and unfortunately that intervention came, after a thousand and one calculations, only after 250 Muslim Bosniaks had died.

The treaties that bring NATO into being in official texts or discourse do not include the US or powerful member states arbitrarily sending occupation forces wherever they wish. On the contrary, what they include is humanitarian interventions in the face of genuinely grave human rights violations or massacres.

What is demanded of this alliance, of which Turkey is a member, is precisely that it remember this mission. If some people perceive NATO as preparing a justification for occupying Syria, when what we emphasize is the hypocrisy in the silence toward Syria of those who ran at once to intervene in Iraq, Libya and now Mali, where things had never reached this point, we leave them to God...

In the end, the Syrian people have no support other than God and the honor of their own people, and it seems that, even without any other outside support, they will accomplish their task themselves by God's grace. For the moment, truly, if only those certain parties would not get in the way, no other favor need be asked.