Discovery of Crematorium
The State Department recently uncovered what it believes to be evidence of recently installed crematoriums in Syria that are being used to dispose of the bodies of prisoners executed by the Assad regime at the facility, but the Trump Administration has been silent on this alarming discovery.
Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, said that the Bashir al-Assad regime is quietly building crematoriums at the Saydnaya Military Prison complex just north of Damascus as part of its ongoing war against civilians and those opposed to the regime.
Officials have accused the Assad government of using the crematoriums to burn the bodies of military prisoners, thereby hiding any evidence of the mass killing the Syrian state has authorized. It is believed that as many as 13,000 people to date have been executed and then incinerated at the prison crematorium, according to Amnesty International.
The organization believes these actions against civilians and innocents rise to the level of war crimes.
According to the State Department briefing—which is largely based on the reporting of humanitarian organizations, US intelligence, NGOs, and international media—thousands of civilians and others are being subjected to “extrajudicial killings” of the Assad government, in which scores are hanged en masse. Ordinary citizens the government of Assad believes are a threat are routinely rounded up, detained, tortured, electrocuted, raped, and killed and then incinerated in a way that conjures images of 1930s Germany.
Satellite photos released by the department show the prison complex and the particular building that US intelligence officials believe houses the crematorium that is being used to hide the extent of mass murder going on at the prison.
Burning Prisoners in attempt to Hide Mass Killing
According to the department briefing, 50 prisoners are executed every day out of the 70 or so held there at any given time in five-person cells. Further, it is reported that Assad had been primarily using mass graves up until around 2013, when, according to the State Department, retrofitting activities were begun at the prison building in which the crematorium is now housed and in which the remains of detainees are disposed of without detection.
To date, some 400,000 people have been executed or killed as a result of the atrocities
of Assad’s civil war, a war that has been raging since 2011 and has fueled one of the worst refugee crises since WWII, all with very little international and US effort to bring this dangerous situation that could possibly escalate to acts of genocide to an end.
Potential for Genocide
While mass murder or killing and genocide are not the same—as Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish decent—first coined and defined the term genocide in 1944 as: "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves," genocide cannot occur without first having mass murder as its precursor.
Definitions of genocide have been expanded, however, since the time of Lempkin to include the intentional extermination of political groups in addition to ethnic or national groups. And while mass killing is seen as the deliberate murder of large numbers of ordinary, non-combatant, citizens, mass killing is not intended to eliminate any particular group as is the case with genocide.
As one can see, it is not improbable that Assad’s civil war atrocities move form mass killings to acts of genocide or the intentional elimination of a particular group of non-combatants.
Given the horrendous nature of what is going on in Syria and the Saydnaya prison and the role Russia has played in assisting Assad in these atrocities, systematically conducted against citizens and others, why has Donald Trump not responded more forcefully to these and other crimes against humanity?
Absence of US Role in Stopping Atrocities
While the administration took action in Syria last month upon learning that the Bashar al-Assad regime dropped sarin gas from planes on its own people, killing nearly 100 men, women, and children, the US has been reluctant under Trump to take a more aggressive stance against the Assad government.
Since the US air campaign in Syria, the US administration has not offered up any significant plan to stop Assad and the increasing brutality conducted against innocent citizens. Trump has resisted efforts at removing Assad, remarking that leadership changes should be left up to the people of Syria in free elections, as though civil war and tyranny are not enough indication of the improbability of either free elections or normal democratic processes.
Nevertheless, it appears the administration has taken the position that it will wait for a “global” response before it will act, reversing decades of US leadership in foreign affairs. In other words, it would appear that the administration is waiting for Russia to take a more active role in solving this problem, as indicated by HR McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor, who suggested that Russia is in a positon to alter history in taking action in Syria.
And while McMaster said he thinks that a “political solution” is no longer possible while Assad is in office, he also indicated that the US would not necessarily be “the ones” to effect Assad’s ousting.
US Isolationism and the Increasing Likelihood of Escalations
This language on the administration’s part seems to align with Trump’s isolationist statements in the past, in which he has suggested that the US will not shoulder burdens alone nor allow countries to take advantage of the US under his leadership.
But this would seem to suggest that the United States would take on a more demure position in internal conflicts and would take action only after a sufficient number of global players move first, guaranteeing a leading from behind position for the US and a potential escalation of conflict and loss of life on a massive scale.
This is obviously not good policy for the US; in fact, Trump’s statements indicate that the administration has no discernible or consistent foreign policy that governs its actions.