Is the fall of Bashar al-Assad really cause for celebration in Syria and across the world? UK government politicians have been trying to separate the relief of the dictator’s departure from any sense of celebration about what comes after. This afternoon in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Assad was a ‘monster’, a ‘dictator’ and a ‘butcher’ and that his downfall was a humiliation for Russia and Iran who supported him.
Lammy also argued that the UK government had been right to refuse to re-engage with the Syrian regime under Assad.
This government chose not to re-engage. We said no, because Assad is a monster. We said no because Assad was a dictator whose sole interest was his wealth and his power and we said no because Assad is a criminal who defied all norms to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people. We said no because Assad is a butcher with the blood of countless innocents on his hands and we said no because Assad was a drug dealer, funding his regime through illicit finance and we said no because he was never ever going to change.
He added that Assad was ‘the Rat of Damascus, fleeing to Moscow with his tail between his legs’ and that ‘we have long hoped to see him gone and welcome the opportunity this brings for the people of Syria’.
The question now is whether ministers will start to engage with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that has taken charge of the country. Lammy accepted that ‘our revulsion of Assad… must not blind us to the risks of this moment’. He said it should ‘rightly make us cautious’ about HTS that they had links to al-Qaeda. As with Keir Starmer, who said today that it was ‘far too early’ to judge whether HTS should be taken off the list of proscribed terrorist organisations, Lammy was careful to suggest there would be no swift restoration for HTS, if at all.
In summary, the UK government doesn’t really know what to do about the opposition to Assad in Syria. It didn’t back in 2013 when it considered arming the rebels against the regime, and then stepped away. It doesn’t today now an opposition group has succeeded in driving the dictator out. Priti Patel referred to that in her response to Lammy, saying: ‘We all remember the shocking images day after day of the barbaric impact of this conflict, and the debates in this House, including the indecision of the West to respond to chemical weapon attacks, which should weigh heavily on our conscience.’ Oddly, though, few MPs mentioned that this afternoon, even those who had been there a decade ago.
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