Hands off Syria (Australia) seeks material for video by Tim Anderson

Syria has so far defended it sovereignty against the Western sponsored terrorism which commenced in March 2011, but at at a terrible terrible cost. According to one estimate, now several years old 80,000 Syrian Army soldiers out of a national death toll of 400,00 have been killed in this conflict. In addition much of Syria's industry, infrastructure has been devastated and many Syrian homes have been destroyed in the conflict.

Now, as the Syrian people try to rebuild their country, they face former U.S. Donald Trump's Caesar Act of June 2019, new harsher sanctions from the European Union, and ongoing sanctions from other countries, including Australia.

In addition, Syria still faces continued illegal occupation of much of its territory by United States, in the Eastern largely Kurdish region, where their is oil. Currently that oil is being stolen by the Kurdish YPG, whose military forces collaborate with the US occupiers and ship it off via pipelines through Turkey.

For all the setbacks suffered by the US recently, both in the Middle East and, domestically, with Donald Trump's 2020 COVID-19 debacle, involving 31,149,565 cases(9.42% per capita) and 561,789 deaths (0.17% per capita), the U.S. still remains a formidable force, and still seems to have resources sufficient to keep the Syrian conflict going, for as long as it takes to wear the Syrian nation into surrender - 5 more years? 10 more years? 50 more years?

Unless people in the United States, and countries allied with the United States, re-build their past anti-war movements, the U.S. will be able to continue its war against Syria, whether actual or through sanctions and terrorist proxies, for as long as it chooses.

In Australia, writers on Candobetter participated in a loosely based group of people in favour of reconciliation with Syria (Mussalah) for a few years. Susan Dirgham had the idea of promoting the Syrian concept of Mussalah, and a small fluctuating group of people met in Melbourne to discuss the situation and update each other. We attended or spoke at information sessions and demonstrations, and documented some of these activities in films, published in articles on Candobetter, and elsewhere. There were attempts to educate politicians and the mainstream press. Susan produced an educational newsletter about Syria. Eventually the loosely-based Melbourne meetings fell away, in part due to new work commitments and new directions and strategies undertaken by the participants.

Unless, anti-war groups in Western nations resume their campaign to end the sanctions against Syria and to get U.S. troops and other foreign occupiers out, it will be much harder for Syria to achieve peace. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) is showing leadership in modeling new directions for Australian foreign policy and deserves support.

The embedded tweet below shows Syrian Residents of Haseke in the north-east of Syria, throwing stones at an armed U.S. army vehicle, passing through. United States forces are illegally in Syria at the invitation of the separatist Kurdish separatist YPG.

Some of the YPG's overseas supporters, for example, Australians for Kurdistan, bizarrely, portray it as a national liberation movement, in the same sense as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front from 1956 until 1975, but the YPG openly welcomes, within Syrian Kurdistan, the military forces of the same United States, which has devastated Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere, in addition to fighting a war against Syria with its terrorist al-Qaeda proxies which the YPG claim to oppose.

As occurred in Yugoslav federation, following the secession of Slovenia 1991, the United States intends to break up Syria into smaller states of different ethnicities as part of its campaign to overthrow the popular elected government of President Bashar al-Assad. Within each of these 'independant' states, minorities, like these Arabs in Haseke, in the north-east of Syria, are likely to face 'ethnic cleansing'.