The Bashar Assad regime claims it is fighting "terrorists" and thus is attacking Eastern Ghouta and the Douma area, yet the scenes we have been watching for days are little children and innocent civilians being butchered by aerial attacks launched by the Syrian regime jet fighters.
We are watching horror scenes of babies dying after a chemical bomb attack in Douma.
The attacks have created global furor and condemnations. President Donald Trump has called Assad "an animal."Turkey has strongly condemned the attacks and has demanded a quick international investigation over the incident.Assad has used chemical weapons before and has been proven guilty and yet no one has bothered to penalize him and his murderous regime. On the contrary they have just warned him and let him go. The chemical weapons stockpiles of the Assad regime were supposedly destroyed under the supervision of the American and Russian governments.
However, chemical attacks in the past year have shown Assad's stockpile is still there and the regime does not feel any remorse in using them. Soon after President Trump came to office he launched missile attacks on an Assad air base used to launch chemical attacks but later it became apparent that the so-called "punishment" was in fact a token gesture and had not even dented Assad's force.
The American government is screaming "vengeance" and are promising to punish Assad. Yet, they first have to stop their terrorist allies led by the PKK to stop cooperating with the Assad regime. It was no surprise to anyone that the PKK called in Assad's forces to take over Afrin when it realized that Turkey would smash the terrorist forces and take the city.
It is no secret that a civilian airport just south of Qamishli in northeastern Syria in the PKK held territory is being run by the Assad regime and there are daily scheduled flights from here to Damascus and Beirut.
So under these circumstances the American government first should concentrate on tightening the leash on the PKK and then they should start screaming foul play in Syria. The atrocities committed by the PKK in northern Syria are no better than what Assad is doing all over the country.
Then of course there is the Russian support for Assad. Turkey owes much to the Russian cooperation for the success of its Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 and the recently concluded Operation Olive Branch in Afrin. But this does not mean we have to turn a blind eye to the fact that Russia and Iran are serving as mentors to the Assad regime and that killer Assad is emboldened because of this and feels free to continue his atrocities.
As Russia controls the airspace over Syria they know well who does what in Syria and thus they know well what Assad has been up to in the name of fighting "terrorists." Russia has to make an extra effort to tame Assad or else the cease-fire process, the no-conflict zone project and even the Astana process will become meaningless and all the hard work put into this effort by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will go down the drain.
Russia is telling the world the Douma chemical attack was a plot and has nothing to do with Assad. But isn't it a fact that such attacks have happened in the past year and the villain responsible for all of those is Assad?
