Syria rejects Washington’s crematorium allegation as ‘unfounded’

… from Press TV,  Tehran

[ Editor’s Note: One has to ask, as usual, “why now” with what is really an old retread story, based on “evidence” that this “new” State Department report clearly states as conditional with its “probably a crematorium” comment below. The State Dept. is smart enough to know this is a weak story, but ran with it anyway, knowing it would get good media play, and it has.

Human Rights Watch, another long-time controlled front organization, also jumps on stories like this with its “war crimes” headline grabber, despite the generalities they use, which would not even get a grand jury indictment, much less a conviction.

There is another issue missing in the story analysis, the little item that Syria clearly has the right, under international law, to execute large numbers of prisoners if it wanted to. In this particular case, it would involve having military trials for all foreign jihadi terrorists captured in the field, where they were convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to death.

Also, always missing from these whiny stories is any mention of the history of mass executions of Syrian soldiers captured by foreign jihadis AND opposition groups. A Google search will bring on a large number of photos and videos which have been plastered all over the internet for years now.

Below is video of the unfortunate Syrian soldiers captured at Tabqa airfield in 2014 being marched into the desert in their underwear to a mass execution site with the cameras rolling, yet the world public knows nothing about this and many other events as they were “played down” on Western press.

This makes our State Department’s cheap shot on the Syrians today all the more reprehensible. You will also notice that if you Google Human Rights Watch, you will not find much concern about Syrian soldier mass executions, nor will you find any remorse for Google’s countless fake-atrocity reports, generally received from jihadi embeds. The Aleppo saga was one of their biggest disgraces; and most all of its reporting has been debunked since Aleppo was liberated; yet we don’t hear a peep over “how could we have gotten in so wrong”. There has not been one suicide at HRW over its shameless conduct, not even a resignation.

So with that as a background, why do you think “they” would have the gall to pedal a story like this now? I suggest to you that from past experience, they know that the general public is so stupid and so easy to manipulate that using this type of propaganda is a “freebie”; and why not use it to put a negative spine on Damascus continuing to liberate more territory, thus strengthening its hand in the future political negotiations.

As for the timing, why now, that is easy. We are just about to kick off the next round of Geneva talks on Syria, so this is just peeing in the water to create a negative atmosphere for more “Assad the monster must go” hype, which we know we will be hearing from the US coalition-supported terrorist groups. Yes, it seems you can just make this stuff up, and “they” do it all the time… Jim W. Dean ]

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–  First published  …  May 16,  2017  –

Syria has categorically rejected Washington’s accusation that Damascus has constructed a prison-based crematorium to burn the bodies of thousands of alleged executed detainees, saying the “unfounded” claim is in fact a new “Hollywood” story made to further interfere in the internal affairs of the Arab country.

“As it is habitual of successive US administrations to fabricate lies and allegations to justify their aggressive and interventionist policies in other sovereign countries, what came out from the current US administration is just a new Hollywood screenplay disconnected from reality,” said the Syrian Foreign Ministry in a statement carried by the official SANA news agency on Tuesday.

The ministry’s response came a day after the US Department of State, citing the US intelligence community and some “credible” humanitarian agencies, accused the Syrian government of cremating the bodies of inmates killed in “extrajudicial” executions in the Saydnaya military prison, located some 30 kilometers north of the capital Damascus, in order to “cover up the extent of mass murders taking place” in the detention facility.

It also distributed a satellite photo, dated April 2017, which allegedly shows the Saydnaya complex, naming some parts of it, including a “probable crematorium.”

Syria has in the past strongly denied any abuse at Saydnaya. Earlier this year, Damascus dismissed as baseless a report by Amnesty International about mass hanging at the prison. The Syrian Foreign Ministry, while strongly condemning the accusation, further said that such allegations were “totally unfounded.”

“They are nothing but the product of the imagination of this administration and its agents,” it added.

The ministry also said that the new accusation was in line with previous baseless allegations that Washington leveled against the Syrian government, including Damascus’ alleged use of “explosive barrels” and “chemical weapons” against the opposition in the Arab country.

The new allegation by the United States against the Syrian government came on the same day that, according to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, US-led airstrikes in Syria’s eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr near the border with Iraq killed at least 23 displaced civilians.

On Saturday, another aerial aggression carried out by the US-led military coalition in Raqqah Province claimed the lives of 12 women.

Earlier on May 9, nearly a dozen people, including four children and six women, lost their lives and several others sustained injuries when US-led warplanes bombarded al-Salihiya village in northern Syria.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be positions of the Daesh Takfiri terrorists inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

The US-led coalition has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.

Syria has been fighting different foreign-sponsored militant and terrorist groups since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated last August that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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