On Tuesday, Amnesty International released a chilling report that detailed the execution by hanging of approximately 13,000 Syrians over the past 5 years. This was done in secret, in the middle of the night, in front of a speedy Kangaroo Court at the Saydaya Military Prison. Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International' regional office in Beirut remarked: "the horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government." The success of the Assad regime and its Western allies in hiding the Syrian government's program of extermination is derived form their ability to shift the public's focus to the atrocities ISIL, which are much smaller in scale. This is a crucial factor in determining the outcome of the bloody conflict. Early in the conflict, surface to air missiles were never provided by sympathetic Western countries to Syrian rebels because Assad's henchmen propagated an Orientalist narrative that painted the opposition as dominated by Jihadists. The reality is that the state terrorism of a well armed state is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the civilian deaths in Syria. This is no accident.
The conditions inside Saydaya Military Prison's 'human slaughterhouse,' can only be described as systematic extermination. Starvation, physical beatings, rape, and confessions extracted by torture are the norm. A 'Military Field Court' presides over a one to two minute trial using their false confessions. Lawyers are denied and defendants are forbidden from speaking in their defense. Hangings are typically carried out every week or two, while those who were held in the detention area above the gallows reported that "we were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death." This sort of treatment is hauntingly similar to the dehumanization carried out in Nazi death camps such as Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz. This leads us to some observations drawn by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
The typical narrative of the Syrian conflict, dominated by ISIS fighters garbed in black cloth, is not only a dimension of Islamophobia, but more importantly it is a facet of the defense of the Assad regime's extermination of the opposition. The true threat to humanity does not come from ideological fanatics, as Hannah Arendt points out. Careerist figures with an inability to truly think sow the grounds for systematic death of unfathomable proportions. Furthermore, what she points out is that the Nazi regime made stringent efforts to remove men who sadistically enjoyed harming their victims from the ranks of S.S. What really allowed these men to continue the endless killing was the idea that they were a part of something grandiose, unique, and magnificent in the annals of history. This sort of bureaucratic extermination poses the gravest threat to the Middle East, because killing with efficiency promises lucrative advancement in the ranks of the Assad regime. Fascists who cloak their banality of evil with ties and close shaves are the real threat, not minimally equipped fascists with beards.
The conditions inside Saydaya Military Prison's 'human slaughterhouse,' can only be described as systematic extermination. Starvation, physical beatings, rape, and confessions extracted by torture are the norm. A 'Military Field Court' presides over a one to two minute trial using their false confessions. Lawyers are denied and defendants are forbidden from speaking in their defense. Hangings are typically carried out every week or two, while those who were held in the detention area above the gallows reported that "we were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death." This sort of treatment is hauntingly similar to the dehumanization carried out in Nazi death camps such as Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz. This leads us to some observations drawn by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
The typical narrative of the Syrian conflict, dominated by ISIS fighters garbed in black cloth, is not only a dimension of Islamophobia, but more importantly it is a facet of the defense of the Assad regime's extermination of the opposition. The true threat to humanity does not come from ideological fanatics, as Hannah Arendt points out. Careerist figures with an inability to truly think sow the grounds for systematic death of unfathomable proportions. Furthermore, what she points out is that the Nazi regime made stringent efforts to remove men who sadistically enjoyed harming their victims from the ranks of S.S. What really allowed these men to continue the endless killing was the idea that they were a part of something grandiose, unique, and magnificent in the annals of history. This sort of bureaucratic extermination poses the gravest threat to the Middle East, because killing with efficiency promises lucrative advancement in the ranks of the Assad regime. Fascists who cloak their banality of evil with ties and close shaves are the real threat, not minimally equipped fascists with beards.
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