Washington, White House. The United States fresh off a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to discuss Syria, accused Syria on Monday of executing thousands of imprisoned political opponents and burning their bodies in a crematorium to hide the evidence, with experts being quick to say this is a sign America is preparing for regime change justification in Syria..
Allegations of mass killings came as President Donald Trump weighs options in Syria, where the US launched cruise missiles on a government air base last month after accusing Assad’s military of killing scores of civilians with a sarin-like nerve agent.
Trump on Monday kicked off a week of meetings with Middle East leaders, sitting down with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi a day before he hosts Turkey’s president. Trump then flies to Saudi Arabia later in the week.
These are all governments that have pressed the United States over six years of civil war in Syria to intervene more forcefully for regime change in Syria. Trump had backed away from President Obama’s calls for regime change in the Arab country, with the new president’s officials saying leadership questions should be left to Syria’s citizens, until his intervention last month. His administration now says Assad cannot bring long-term stability to Syria and that he must go, was the takeaway from the recent Lavrov visit.
The State Department said it believes about 50 detainees each day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus. Many of the bodies are then burned in a “crematorium to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place,” said Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for the Middle East, Jones is a neocon holdover Obama era State Department employee who has strongly advocated for Assad’s removal for years.
America’s State Department has released commercial satellite photographs showing what it describes as a building in a prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, “do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show construction consistent with such use.” Which is a nice way of saying, “We don’t know what is there, but we sure as hell hope it’s a crematorium.”
The whole situiation reminds many of another big mistake. The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The industrial complex was composed of four buildings. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum and employed over 300 workers, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use.
The factory was destroyed in 1998 by a missile attack launched by the United States government, killing one employee and wounding eleven. The US government alleged that the factory was used for the processing of VX nerve agent and that the owners of the plant had ties to the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.
In fact the factory made baby formula and aspirin. Americans using words like “probable” or “consistent with use as” need to be more certain, before sending American children in for a regime change talked about for years and now being sold as another “Syrian Holocaust” as justification for possibly starting a world war.