Russia and Iran face a choice on ‘crazy’ Assad

Bashar Al Assad fits his own definition of a "crazy person" by killing his own citizens, so why do Russia and Iran continue to support his regime?

‘No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” Syrian president Bashar Al Assad said in an interview just over two years ago, at a time when 4,000 of his citizens were estimated to have died in the conflict. As the Geneva 2 peace conference convenes in Switzerland today, the death toll stands at more than 130,000 and the regime is facing damning new evidence that it systematically starved, tortured and murdered 11,000 detainees.

For Russia and Iran, the nations that provide crucial backing to Mr Al Assad either in the Security Council, by supplying military equipment or through direct participation of combatants on the ground, there can be little doubt that they are indeed supporting a “crazy person”. While that support continues, the military stalemate between regime and opposition forces is likely to continue, prolonging both the conflict and the suffering of millions of displaced Syrians.

In that interview in December 2011 with ABC News's Barbara Walters, Mr Al Assad accepted that some members of Syria's armed forces had "gone too far", but insisted these were the actions of individuals and not the institution, and that those responsible had been punished. That claim is contradicted by thousands of Syrian government photographs and files smuggled out of the country by a former military photographer and showing what a former war crimes prosecutor described as "industrial-scale killing" of 11,000 detainees between the start of the conflict and August last year.

As The National reports today, another defector has also revealed that the regime’s claim about having to combat Al Qaeda radicals is a lie because it was Syrian intelligence agencies that released Islamist militants from prisons to subvert the peaceful uprising. The move is widely seen as a tactic by the regime to turn the peaceful uprising in the beginning to an armed one, to persuade the world that it was indeed fighting Islamic radicals. In an interview broadcast on YouTube this week, one of those prisoners, Zahran Aloush who leads a major fighting group that operates around Damascus, conceded that the regime might have released them to radicalise the uprising. The reports show that Mr Al Assad has no principles and that he is willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power.

Combined with the regime’s use of chemical and conventional weapons on civilian populations, can Moscow or Tehran pretend that they are not propping up a regime willing to do anything to cling to power, regardless of the human cost to ordinary Syrians?

In supporting the Assad regime, Russia and Iran are both acting in their self-interest to maintain their influence in the region. At what point will they acknowledge the obvious about the nature of the regime? Until they do so and withdraw their support, events like Geneva 2 are likely to remain pointless talkfests.