Mick Hartley

The key part of the latest Amnesty revelations about the mass executions and routine use of torture by the Syrian regime:

Few people are ever released from this prison 20 miles north of Damascus, and those who do not die of torture or starvation, are sometimes led quietly after midnight to a 25-by-15 foot concrete room. Blindfolded, it is here that Syria’s top officials have overseen the clandestine hangings of between 5,000 and 13,000 people, the report found. Later, their causes of death will be ruled by doctors as respiratory failure—an effort by the Assad regime to create a phony paper trail to legitimize these thousands of executions and hide them from the world.

Saydnaya prison is notorious for being a closely held secret, and until recently little was known about how it operates. Earlier this summer, Amnesty released a separate report on the prison that detailed its living conditions. But these new interviews outline a structured means to kill those opposed to Assad—everyone from factory owners to students and professors. The report shows how Assad’s regime has executed these men in ways deliberate, and highly conscious of how, if exposed, the global community would denounce such acts. Amnesty investigators interviewed 84 people, including former prisoners, guards, judges, and the doctors who signed off on the death certificates of those killed at Saydnaya. These interviews show a human rights crisis that the Syrian government has sanctioned since at least 2011, and which could pose a problem for the new Trump administration.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the U.S. would work “with any country” in order to eradicate ISIS. Trump has specifically referenced his willingness to work with Russia, and he has already discussed this with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia, meanwhile, has backed the Syrian government in the country’s six-year civil war, saying it shares a common interest in defeating ISIS. Syria has used this same smokescreen as excuse to target civilians with bombs and to arrest dissenters. And, according the Amnesty, the executions inside the Saydnaya prison are authorized by the highest-level officials in the Syrian government, including the Grand Mufti, and either the minister of defense or the chief of staff of the Army, both of whom act on behalf of Assad.

Any accommodation with Assad now is going to be even more tainted - as though we didn't already have enough evidence of his brutality. A regime that the previous US President did nothing to discourage despite the fine talk about crossing red lines (wouldn't want to upset Iran), and the current US President seems determined to support, alongside his Russian friends.

Will this go any way towards changing his mind? Probably not. "Fake news".