Is it bad to view Assad as the lesser of the evils in Syria?

format_quote Originally Posted by Born_Believer

I do not subscribe to the idea that Assad is totally peaceful but yes, before US intervention in Syria, Assad's regime had a peaceful society under its belt. I was in Damascus circa 2007 and I remember, we would leave our little bed sit and not even bother locking the room. No one feared theft. People walked the streets openly. Everyone looked happy and healthy, although they weren't as affluent as here in the UK or elsewhere in the west. There were issues with businesses, as you would expect under a communist regime but, as we would say in urdu, i twas "pur sukhoon". Peaceful.

After US intervention, not only have groups such as ISIS been funded and armed but plenty of other such groups, some funded by teh Saudis, Israelia and others by the Iranians and beyond. Assad's regime has responded violently to this, which is to be expected of course. Has Assad and his forces carried out atrocities? I do not know. The reports in the western media and the footage is entirely misinformed and in most cases, filled with lies and very little, if any, factually accurate data. 5 people in egypt were arrested just a few weeks back for making Aleppo videos in a building site. Several social media accounts which have "reported" from Aleppo and elsewhere have turned out to be false. In fact, use our common sense, in a place like Aleppo where people can barely gain food and water (apparently) they manage wifi? That does not add up for even the most basic intellect.

Ultimately, my opinion on this so called Arab spring, uprising, revolution, whatever useless terms one would like to use falls in with what our Prophet PBUH has taught us. Do not encourage violent uprisings, do not fight leaders as long as you are allowed to peacefully practice your faith, whether the ruler is muslim or non-muslim. Once again ,we can use our common sense and logic, why would Rasoolallah PBUH and the great scholars of our past tell us to avoid violent action? Because ultimately it is the population, the civilians, the everyday innocents (muslim or otherwise) who suffer. Look at Syria, at Libya, at Egypt...in the places of semi-tyrants they have mass genocide. The more we leave the path of Muhammad PBUH, the more we walk into ruin.

I end in the words of our Prophet PBUH:

"Whoever rejects obedience to the ruler and divides the community and dies will have died upon ignorance. Whoever fights under the banner of one who is blind, raging for the sake of tribalism, or calling to tribalism, or supporting tribalism, and is killed will have died upon ignorance. Whoever rebels against my nation, striking the righteous and wicked alike and sparing not even the believers and does not fulfill the pledge of security, then he has nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with him."

Jazakullah Cheir brother finally finally someone who was in Syria too and has political knowledge and feels the same like I do. I may have overrated him by saying totally peaceful but he isnt so bad like they claim in the Media, wallahi the words you uttered my family members say that too. No one feared getting robbed or so, the majority lived in piece. Ahla yamek ya Syria

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format_quote Originally Posted by Huzaifah ibn Adam

Wa `Alaykumus Salaam wa Rahmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh.

Aameen to your Du`aa, and may Allaah Ta`aalaa grant you the same, Aameen.

See this:

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-...een-his-people

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...amnesty-report

http://www.economist.com/news/middle...shar-al-assads

https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-...sad-war-crimes

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...a-1095735.html

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/...aesar-hospital

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.d05500d46d37

There are also many videos on YouTube - if you do a search - which shows some of the things which Bashar al-Kalb and his regime have perpetrated. There are some torture videos as well which have been uploaded. People present recorded with their phones.

JazakAllahu khair for the links akhi.

May Allah destroy him, ameen.

format_quote Originally Posted by lostboy2389

totally agree. Assad is absolutly peaceful, the media just tries to make him look bad

Are you having a laugh?


Ask the poor Syrian refugees who have been displaced because of this demon and then tell me he is "peaceful". These people were there when it all happened and when their family members including young children were killed in front of them by this evil man's cronies. Sod the media, no one believes them anyway, ask the people it happened against. They are eye witnesses!


Have a look online at all the torture videos and of little children being killed by this wicked man and then tell me he is "peaceful".


These poor souls have had to run off to countries far and wide, not because they wanted to, but because they would have been killed by this "peaceful" man's regime.


I know everyone is entitled to their own opinions and all that but saying he is "peaceful" would be like saying Satan is an angel!

I also agree these is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. If there was, I would say he is more evil. He has done this to his own people. External forces are different, they obviously wouldn't care because the people that are being killed are not "their" people.

There is absolutely not excuse for oppression and killing civilians. End of!

format_quote Originally Posted by Yahya.

That's not true brother. In the ahadith the term ''وليُّ الأمر'' is used, which is being translated as ''ruler'', but the term waliyy can only refer to Muslims. Allah swt says: ''O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies (awliyaa). They are [in fact] allies (awliyaa) of one another.'' (05/51)

Awliyaa is the plural of waliyy. A disbeliever can never be the ruler of a mu'min. As I said previously, revolting against a Muslim, faasiq leader is also not prohibited if you think you can overthrow him. The companion Abdullah ibn Zubayr (may Allah be pleased with him) rebelled against Abdulmalik ibn Marwan and his governor Hajjaj ibn Yusuf for example.



We should believe to the news a just and trustworthy Muslim brings.
''O you who have believed, if there comes to you a disobedient one with information, investigate, lest you harm a people out of ignorance and become, over what you have done, regretful.'' (Hujuraat, 6)
The antonym of disobedient (faasiq) is 'aadil (just).

The witness of a Muslim is accepted if you don't find any deficiency in him or the news he brought. And just refusing news without researching it shows one's interest in the mentioned matter and degree of desire in finding the truth.



There are many witnesses of the Syrian regimes cruelties and disadvantaging of Sunnis. Political opposition and criticizer of the president (Hafez/Bashar) would fill the prisons or be assassinated/executed. Maybe you could start by researching the case of Hamza Ali Al Khatib and watching the documentary (example) روح الثورة Soul of the revolution to understand my point of view.

Brother, do not nit pick hadiths, it is detrimental to you. PLus there are plenty of other hadiths and these have been taken from the sahih collections and translated by world renowned scholars over many years.

plus, just use your common sense, had the fighting Syria made it a better country or a worse one.

format_quote Originally Posted by lostboy2389

Jazakullah Cheir brother finally finally someone who was in Syria too and has political knowledge and feels the same like I do. I may have overrated him by saying totally peaceful but he isnt so bad like they claim in the Media, wallahi the words you uttered my family members say that too. No one feared getting robbed or so, the majority lived in piece. Ahla yamek ya Syria

Sent from my SM-J500FN using IslamicBoard mobile app

I believe Allah has given us all intelligence, an ability to logically understand a situation. Logic shows us that whenever these so called revolutions have popped up in the Muslim world in recent years, it is the Muslims who have suffered the most. Take LIbya, the destruction of Gaddafis regime has led to civil war, UK/French puppets in government or what remains of a government and ultimately, the oil wealth which at one time had been nationalised, now in the hands of Americans and Israelis (to name just a few).

Yet we muslims just aren't learning from this. We keep repeating our mistakes over and over again, we keep calling for foreign intervention or armed uprisings and some of us even financially support so called freedom fighter groups in these countries. Just look at some of the opinions on this thread, people actually calling for more violence and destruction, it's as if we have been sleeping under a rock all our lives.

format_quote Originally Posted by Yahya.

I do not pick hadiths, I took the hadith you quoted. Anyway, most hadiths contain the word waliyyul amr, which can only refer to a Muslim leader (aadil/faasiq). Why don't you look up some fiqh books? No scholar ever approved disbelievers as leaders. That's even logically comprehensible; how can a Muslim be loyal to a disbeliever? Even in social circumstances, a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a disbeliever, because he could force her to disobedience (to Allah), so how can a disbeliever, in political circumstances, which is a greater extent as it concerns the whole ummah, have the command and rule over the Muslims?



You just consider the worldly situation in your argumentation. I use my common sense, and I never denied that the fighting in Syria is harsh and harmful to the population and environment. That's the case with all wars. Hence war requires sacrifice. And we need to offer this sacrifice and endure the difficulties on the path of establishing an Islamic rule. Revolutions and Islamic struggle in general was never easy and peaceful. The pophet (sallallahu alayhi wa salam) and his companions (radiyallahu anhum) went through years of slander, exclusion, torture, boycott and later wars were they were outnumbered, sieges where they couldn't find any food and had to tie stones to their bellies to repress their hunger. Still they were patient and never gave compromises on the path.

Khabbab bin Al-Aratt (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: We complained to the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) regarding the persecution inflicted upon us by the disbelievers while he was lying in the shade of the Ka`bah, having made a pillow of his cloak. We submitted: "Why do you not supplicate for our prevalence (over the opponents)?''. He (PBUH) replied, "Among those people before you, a man would be seized and held in a pit dug for him in the ground and he would be sawed into two halves from his head, and his flesh torn away from his bones with an iron comb; but, in spite of this, he would not wean away from his Faith. By Allah, Allah will bring this matter to its consummation until a rider will travel from San`a' to Hadramout fearing none except Allah, and except the wolf for his sheep, but you are in too much of a hurry". [Al-Bukhari]

''Or do you think that you will enter Paradise while Allah has not yet made evident those of you who fight in His cause and made evident those who are steadfast?'' [Aalu Imran, 142]

I can't indulge in a discussion with someone who refuses to accept hadith.

Salaam

Lesser of the two evils? is it as simple as that?

Up to 13,000 secretly hanged in Syrian jail, says Amnesty

Thousands of other opponents of Assad died from torture and starvation at Saydnaya prison, witness reports suggest

As many as 13,000 opponents of Bashar al-Assad were secretly hanged in one of Syria’s most infamous prisons in the first five years of the country’s civil war as part of an extermination policy ordered by the highest levels of the Syrian government, according to Amnesty International.

Many thousands more people held in Saydnaya prison died through torture and starvation, Amnesty said, and the bodies were dumped in two mass graves on the outskirts of Damascus between midnight and dawn most Tuesday mornings for at least five years.

The report, Human Slaughterhouse, details allegations of state-sanctioned abuse that are unprecedented in Syria’s civil war, a conflict that has consistently broken new ground in depravity, leaving at least 400,000 people dead and nearly half the country’s population displaced.

It suggests thousands more people could have been hanged in Saydnaya since the end of 2015, after which former guards and detainees who spoke to Amnesty no longer had access to verifiable information from inside the prison.

Among the 84 people interviewed were four former guards at two key buildings, a “red building” in which civilian detainees were held and a “white building” that held former military members and where hangings were carried out in the basement. More than 12 months of research focused on 31 men who were held in both buildings. A military judge was also interviewed.

The witnesses claimed that once or twice a week 20 to 50 people at a time were hanged after sham trials before a military court. Their bodies were taken to the nearby Tishreen military hospital where a cause of death was typically registered as a respiratory disorder or heart failure. They were buried on military land in Nahja, south of Damascus, and Qatana, a small town to the west.

The report’s author, Nicolette Waldman, said the estimate of the number of people hanged ranged from a minimum of 5,000 to a maximum of 13,000.

“There is no reason at all to expect that the hangings have stopped. We believe it is very likely that the executions are going on to this day and that many thousands more people have been killed,” she said.

“They came for them on a Monday. Before they were hanged, victims were condemned to death in a two- to three-minute hearing. The death sentence was signed by the minister of defence, who was deputised to sign by President Assad. It is inconceivable that all of the top officials did not know about it. This was a policy of extermination.”


Amnesty International estimates 13,000 people were killed in mass hangings in Saydnaya prison between 2011 and 2015

Waldman said the hanging victims were separate to claims of the systematic killing of more than 11,000 detainees in Syria from March 2011 until August 2013, which were documented by a photographer codenamed Caesar who worked for the Syrian military police.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed last May that at least 60,000 people had died as a result of torture or dire conditions in Syrian prisons from the earliest months of the anti-Assad insurrection.

Since then, Syria has been gradually torn apart. The initial uprising was met with a brutal crackdown and mass detentions, and by late 2011 it had started to transform into an armed insurgency that aimed to topple the four-decade Assad dynasty and its supporting state structure.

By mid-2012 the uprising had been joined by jihadists from outside Syria, who blended with hundreds of hardcore Islamists freed from Syrian prisons who had begun to splinter the opposition. All the while, mass arrests and detentions accelerated, as did an exodus of civilians from most parts of the country.

The war soon sparked the biggest refugee crisis anywhere since the end of the second world war. Mass immigration has since been a focal point of political discourse in Europe and the US, feeding the rise of populism and nationalistic leaders such as Donald Trump, whose travel ban prevented Syrians, among others, from entering the US, until the order was overturned by a federal judge on Friday.

Amnesty said non-state armed groups had also carried out serious human rights abuses against detainees. It singled out the al-Qaida-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State as perpetrators of war crimes. But it said the “vast majority of detention-related violations since 2011 have been carried out by Syrian authorities”.

Witnesses to the killings in Saydnaya described a methodical routine in which those about to be hung were collected from their cell block in the red building in the afternoon and told they were to be transferred to another prison. They were instead taken to the basement of the white building, several hundred metres away, and repeatedly beaten. They were taken before a military judge and condemned, before being hanged between midnight and 3am.

“Some of them initially did not know what the sounds were,” said Waldman. “It is such a dehumanising and horrible experience in prison already.”

Amnesty said its witnesses had detailed each step of the process, with some giving graphic accounts of having heard the hangings being carried out in the room beneath them. The organisation said it had sought a response to its allegations from Syrian officials in mid-January but received no reply. Amnesty researchers are barred from entering Syria.

“What we have uncovered is beyond anything else we have seen,” said Waldman. “This demands a new kind of response. These practices have to stop. It is one more step of diabolical intent by the Syrian authorities.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/07/up-to-13000-secretly-hanged-in-syrian-jail-says-amnesty

Salaam

Another update

Saydnaya: If torture “works”, it doesn’t stop people rising up

Amnesty’s recent report about the horrors of Saydnaya prison sheds light on a torture complex that has was mercilessly used as a tool to crush the resolve of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. In one horrifying testimony, a former detainee ‘Salam’ describes the welcome party prisoners face when they first arrive at the torture complex:

“You are thrown to the ground and they use different instruments for the beatings: electric cables with exposed copper wire ends – they have little hooks so they take a part of your skin – normal electric cables, plastic water pipes of different sizes and metal bars… I was blindfolded the whole time, but I would try to see somehow. All you see is blood: your own blood, the blood of others… ”

Other prisoners recalled the use of rape, starvation and water deprivation. They heard the gurgling voices and the snapping of necks of prisoners who were hanged en masse. Former detainee ‘Hassan’ spoke of the of the consequences of the sexual violence prisoners faced:

“I know all about it, I lived it… Sometimes psychological pain is worse than physical pain, and the people who were forced to do this were never the same again. I know some who died because they became so depressed they just stopped eating the little food they were offered…”

Prisoners are stripped of their humanity and are fed like animals. ‘Kareem’, who was held in the prison, said:

“On the Floor, we have the scabs and puss of the scabies, hair from our bodies, blood from the lice. All of this is on the Floor. But the Floor is where they put the food…The food spreads out all over ground.”

It is a horrific, repulsing reality and a damning indictment of powers that still wish for the Syrian people to negotiate at the same table with their oppressors, on their oppressors’ terms.

Faces of the Syrian Torture chambers

Many prisoners who survived Saydnaya later moved on to lead the revolution. The leaders of Ahrar Al-Sham, one of the largest if not the largest rebel group, were all once imprisoned in Saydnaya as was the former leader of the rebel faction Jaysh Al-Islam, Zahran Alloush and the current leader of Suqur Al Sham, Isa Al-Shaykh.

Amongst the rank and file of the fighters, many experienced first hand the brutality of the Assad regime prisons. CAGE outreach director Moazzam Begg met many of them during his travels to Syria. He said he was surprised “just how many of the Syrians I met had been imprisoned and how widely the cases of Syrian rendition victims, including Guantanamo prisoners, are known.”

The notoriety of the Assad regime in torture and repression was utilised by the US in its War on Terror. Despite being designated within the “Axis of Evil” that George Bush spoke of, Syria received many renditioned prisoners, including four Canadian citizens and one German citizen, all renditioned illegally by the US.



In Syria, they faced the most cruel and degrading treatment. The men, Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyad Nureddin, Ahmad Abou El Maati and the German Mohammed Haydar Zammar, were taken to the infamous Fara’ Falestin, or Palestine Branch detention centre, known for its “underground tombs” and “graves”.

Maher, who was shockingly renditioned from the US mainland, spoke of the torture they faced: “Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding”. On one occasion he was beaten repeatedly over a period of 18 hours, to the extent he said “I was so scared I urinated on myself twice”.

One particular prisoner Abu Mus’ab As-Suri was arrested late 2005 in Quetta, Pakistan, before being handed to the US. He was held at the US naval base on Diego Garcia, a British Island in the Indian Ocean.

In September 2006 he was transferred secretly to the Syrian regime. In all likelihood Abu Mus’ab, whose real name is, Mustafa Sitt Mariam Nasar, would have been tortured and mistreated for his support of the 1980’s Hama uprising.



Nasar’s co-associate, Abu Khalid Al-Suri, was also arrested by Pakistani forces and handed to the US during the same period of time in 2005. He also ended up in Syrian dungeons before finally being released just as the revolution began, only to emerge as one of the leading figures of Ahrar Al-Sham. He was later assassinated by IS for his opposition to their ‘state’.

Does torture work?

Through the stories and experiences of those who survived the torture of Saydnaya, Fara’ Falestin and other Syrian dungeons we can follow a tale of defiance against all odds. The barbarity we hear of sought to crush the resolve of the people, but as we enter the sixth year of the revolution, that resolve seems to have only increased in intensity.

Those who were once subjugated and humiliated by the regime, are today bravely retelling their stories while others have emerged as leaders of the opposition to defend their people against the aggression of the regime that tortured them.

We have been told by Donald Trump, the leader of so-called ‘free world’, that ‘torture works’. Keeping in mind that the Iraq war was based on false evidence gathered from torture, it is clear that torture has only ever worked to humiliate and subjugate people, as well as to manufacture a false narrative that feeds the War on Terror.

Still, in many cases, torture does not stop the will to seek justice, accountability and freedom. Saydanaya despite all its terrors, stands testament to this.

https://cage.ngo/article/saydnaya-if-torture-works-it-doesnt-stop-people-rising-up/