00:00 Mohamed Najjar: Good evening to you. Thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to all of you [?] for attending this session. Being a Syrian, I feel grateful to everyone who took the time and effort to come and attend and listen to what is happening in Syria. And Syria is a sad story. To highlight a few facts about Syria before we get into the political aspect of the problem: Syria is a 23 million country that is situated in the heart of the Middle East. We have Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and the Mediterranean in the west. 85% of the population in Syria is mainstream Muslim, certainly liberal, quite moderate people. We never seen any anything about, like, extremism [?] or crimes that are being committed under the name, or in the name, of religion.
01:03 I have spent about thirty years of my life in Syria, and I lived under the reign of the father and then part of the son's. I have witnessed the brutality of the Syrian regime. I have seen bodies being dragged by vehicles and tanks on the streets of Aleppo. Just to give you a brief idea about how brutal this regime is, I can tell you a short story about a girl in this beginning [?] who has been taken by the Secret Service and jailed for about six months. She has been tortured and raped. Very young, beautiful girl, from an area called Saif al-Dawla or al-Furqan [?], very close to the Aleppo University. She has been raped several times by those murderers and criminals.
02:06 After six months she was released; she was pregnant. Her family lives in a very nice place near the university, in the fourth storey. They had a great shock, and the girl was quite depressed. They did not know how to handle the situation; psychiatrists can't do much. And not long [?], a few weeks later, at 4 o'clock in the morning, noise downstairs, and she threw herself. Her tummy burst and she died with the baby. This is just a glimpse of what is happening in Syria.
02:39 Syria used [?] to be called the cradle of civilisations. You have the mosque, the synagogue and the church hugging each other in Aleppo [?] and Mosul [?]. We lived for years and years side by side. We love each other. I don't remember that I said "this is Christian" or "this is Armenian" or "this is a Turkmen" or "this is Jewish". Jewish are very, very few still in Syria; maybe most of them have left after the uprising has started.
03:10 Media talk about Syria as a civil war, and this is the favourite name for the uprising in Syria. We tried several times to speak and try to explain the situation in Syria, but it has to be a civil war. A civil war can be between two components of the society, which you have a little bit of balance. But these Alawites who governed Syria for about 50 years, they make about six or seven percent of the population, but they own everything. It's like a farm [?]. They can do anything to anyone.
03:40 Another little story. A young chap who was studying politics in the University of Damascus — and that was narrated to me by a very close friend. He said to me that this guy was attending one of the lectures, stood up and asked a question, but the question was quite sensitive and sounded critical to the regime: about freedom, about the wealth of the country, resources, this and that. And he sat down, the lecturer answered the question. After the lecture has ended, went out, and the Secret Service members were waiting. He was taken for a few days, came back after a week — he's a different person. He left the university, and then he left the country. He couldn't — for some reason he left the country.
04:46 Years after, this friend meets him and asks him what happened: why did he leave university, why — but why did he disappear? And he smiled to him and said, "Do you remember that question I asked in the lecture? Do you remember what happened to me?" He said, "You came back and we saw you, but we were a bit depressed." He said, "They removed my testicles. I have no life after that. No family, no kids, no—" So this is another story, just to give you an idea.
05:17 In Syria there is no civil war. It started as a genuine peaceful uprising. Demonstrations were all over Syria: started in Daraa and then in Homs, then in [inaudible], in Aleppo. And Aleppo is a city that is inhabited by four million people; now we're talking about maybe half a million left. In Syria millions of people have been, you know, evacuating the country. Many of them drowned in the sea, many of them have been killed on the way, many of them — let alone the barrel bombs, the gas, the chemical attack, this and that.
06:22 The situation is — and I agree with Professor Achcar when he highlighted certain points about the actual reason why Syria is being divided, is being destroyed, is being disintegrated. Syria is the centrepiece, basically, between these two camps: a camp that is led by the United States of America and the other one is led by Russia. We're talking about geopolitical conflicts. We have interests that are contradicting each other. The Americans are siding indirectly with the Assad regime, but at the same time they promised the Syrian people with help. They always talk about the President as being brutal, as being a dictator, but in fact nothing happens, no act whatsoever.
07:24 And this is something that has been said actually in the first beginning of the revolution by Robert Ford, who met with members of the Syrian opposition and told them: Alawites have to stay [?], Syrian opposition would not be armed, and Syria has to be united. But later on they changed, and they're talking about dividing Syria or disintegrating Syria.
07:56 The Russians intervened in Syria because of their interests, of course, not because they love Bashar al-Assad or they love the Alawites. They have been friends for such a long time, since the early days of Hafez al-Assad, since he was actually a defence minister. So they want to keep Bashar al-Assad. Because the Iranians have actually struck a deal with Bashar al-Assad in 2009. They want this area, what they call the Shia Crescent. They want to keep their proxies in Lebanon, in Damascus and in Iraq.
08:29 Iraq has been handed over to them with the blessing of the Americans. Saddam Hussein has been killed and hanged, and he was shown to the whole world as a dictator. He was a dictator, we agree with that. But under Saddam Hussein we did not see this sectarianism, we didn't see the mass killing of people, we didn't see the displacement of huge — we have the demographic change that is taking place. And the Turks now are insisting on being present in the battle for Mosul because they know for a fact that the Iranians with the Iraqi regime now are going to expel all the Mosul [?] Sunni Arabs of the city, and they want to replace that with the Shia peoples, OK? So they can have the whole of Iraq, and they can advance into Syria. They can advance into Syria and they want to govern the whole area, so they have, I mean, a way to the Mediterranean and they can export the gas.
09:36 The gas is another issue, which we have mentioned earlier. The conflict is about interests, is about these resources of gas. There is a huge, and maybe the biggest, field in the world that is in the Arab Gulf [?], or the Persian, some people would like to call it — a very huge [field] under the sea. And Qatar has the money and is actually exporting this gas. Iran has got a part of it, maybe one-third; Qatar has the rest. So the Qataris and the Jordanian [?], Turkish, they wanted to get the gas pipeline going through Syria into Turkey and then to Europe. The Russians with their friends are trying to stop that, and they wanted to enforce their pipeline. And somebody named that as Pipelineistan [?], or something like this. So it is about the pipelines, it is about the oil, it is about the gas.
10:37 And the situation — and who is paying the price? So America is fighting Russia on the Syrian land, within this small country. Our children, our future, our land are the price. For the Americans, they don't send troops on the ground; they actually bomb from the air with these huge, very advanced, you know, aircraft. They don't need to be on the ground. They keep people — they manage. Actually this is one of the articles that talk about the role of the Americans: they don't want to sort out the situation, they don't want to stop the bloodshed, they keep managing.
11:42 If you follow the news, you would know that the Syrian opposition managed to break the siege of the city of Aleppo within a short period of time, but they cut the supplies, and the result is, after the bombardment of the Russians, the city has been besieged again. So many people are now within the city of Aleppo: the destruction and the killing. They have announced, I think, a truce for some of the fighters to leave. But this is — I don't believe this. We have seen so many, I mean, truces; didn't work. The Russians are lying, Syrian regime is lying, Iran is lying, and some of the others are lying, because they want to keep their interests.
12:45 Who is paying the price is the children of Syria, is the integrity of Syria, is the dignity of the Syrian people. Syrian people do not belong to Sweden or Germany or Britain; they belong to Syria. And if we are to do anything, I think we need to support these people to stay in Syria — to stay in Syria — and give them the right to defend themselves, which they have been deprived from since the start of this six-year [recording ends]
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