In Syria, no war is righteous and no weapon is honourable

It is by now clear that the bloodiest war machine can’t muffle a nation’s cry for freedom and that violence only begets violence.

The political term “state terrorism” was once popularised by former Syrian President Hafez Al Assad. The term reflected his policy of hosting resistance movements such as the Islamic Jihad Movement, Hamas and Hizbollah. His stance, no doubt, gained popular support at home.

Al Assad arrogated to himself the right to speak on behalf of the armed resistance movement and highlighted its determination to fight injustice. He mastered the game of moving armed conflicts to other countries, while still playing a pivotal role in them.

He once called for an international conference to define “terrorism” and draw a distinction between takfiri (hardline Islamic ideology) terrorism and nations’ legitimate resistance, including armed struggle against brutality. He was referring to Israel and its brutality against the Palestinian people.

This definition would include a state’s repression in the form of unjustly arresting people and displacing them from their villages and cities; it is a state terrorism that is no different from other internationally condemned kinds of terrorism. And thus peoples have a right to take up arms to defend themselves.

Violence against civilians under the pretext of countering terrorism does not make the crime different or less appalling, even when the atrocities are committed by a state’s army.

In line with his regime’s policy of rejecting Israeli terrorism, Hafez Al Assad’s declared stance was that the acts of the Palestinian people against Israelis at home and beyond – and their targeting of Israeli interests and those of their American backers – were legitimate acts to fend off the brutality of Israel. Guns at the hands of the resistance are the most honourable of weapons, even when they are carried by unorganised militias, even if they target civilian gatherings and even if they kill innocent civilians. The fighters who sacrificed their lives to bomb an Israeli military checkpoint or facility were martyrs and heroes.

The government media would never allow the use of the word “suicide bomber” for such fighters. Celebrations were held at the offices of the Baath party across Syrian cities to pay tribute to the martyrs who targeted Israeli and American interests everywhere in the world. The Syrian regime named schools, squares and streets after the heroic martyrs, to show solidarity with the blessed jihad against Israel’s state terrorism.

The glorification of “martyrdom” reached a level so high that Foreign Minister Walid Al Muallam, commenting on the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, did not dare mention the term “suicide bomber”, telling media instead that Hariri was assassinated by a “martyr” operation.

Al Assad’s policy and his open positions against the Israeli occupation’s army offer in my opinion ample evidence to justify what the Syrian people have done to fight the brutality of Bashar Al Assad’s regime, a regime whose cruelty against its own people has outmatched that of all fascist, kleptocratic and oligarchic regimes across the world.

In the decade leading up to the revolution in Syria, I wrote extensively on state terrorism. At the time, I meant to criticise Israeli leaders such as Yitzak Shamir, Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon, who all have left their fingerprints on a series of massacres in Palestine and Lebanon. It never occurred to me that one day I would revisit my old articles to see in them the same behaviour as that of none other than the Syrian regime.

The regime’s conduct today embodies the very state terrorism that it spent decades opposing. The Baath party’s intellectuals have spoken about the nature of the regular army’s actions in its continuing war on so-called armed cells they classify as terrorist.

The regime bolstered its terrorism with Scud missiles and explosive-filled barrels targeting civilians in towns and cities, field hospitals and refugee camps in addition to fatal torture sessions, showcasing a level of cruelty unseen in the Israeli army’s most brutal wars on Arabs. I am certainly not fond of the Israeli army’s terrorist conduct, which has yet to be deterred, but all of its crimes combined cannot begin to compare to the suffering Syrian civilians have endured under this ruthless regime.

The whole situation can be summed up in a religious conference the Assad regime hosted around a year after the onset of the revolution. The conference brought together some 300 clerics from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan to speak about Israel’s crimes. Official documents were presented to prove that the Israeli army was practising state terrorism and that in the course of a single year it killed 37 Palestinians and caused the displacement of six families. The evidence was sufficient for the conference participants to declare the need for armed resistance against the tyrant enemy.

The regime continues to display images of Al Qunaitra village which the Israeli army destroyed 40 years ago, but it somehow fails to show photos of over 200 similar towns and over 2,000 villages that its own regular army has destroyed.

I am not trying to present another lamentation over the hardships of Syrians. As a former member of the parliament, I am addressing my friends with whom I worked towards building a secure and stable country. I urge them to come clean with themselves and do what it takes to avoid further killings. It is by now clear that the bloodiest war machine can’t muffle a nation’ cry for freedom and that violence only begets violence.

No weapon is honourable, no murder is legitimate and no war is righteous.

Unless this madness is stopped, soon, all the world’s madmen would go to fight on Syrian soil. It was the literature of the Baath party that pushed those tens of thousands of the country’s civilians to turn to arms to defend their people and their towns against the regular army.

This is a call for our conscience to awaken. It would be utterly absurd if we believed that the other side has no moral sense whatsoever.

Dr Mohammed Habash, a religious scholar, is a former member of the Syrian parliament