NCRI – The war in Syria would not last and the human tragedies caused would not persist without the direct involvement of the Iranian regime, top Syrian opposition official Suheir Atassi wrote on Wednesday in France’s Le Monde.
The Iranian regime is heavily involved in besieging the people of the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Daraya, Ms. Atassi said in her op-ed which was published in the print edition of Le Monde on August 10, 2016.
As the main sponsor of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Tehran has torpedoed the peace negotiations this year in Geneva and Vienna for the establishment of a Syrian political transition body.
She said Tehran’s strategy is to refuse to cooperate with the international community in reaching a political agreement in Syria and fighting the terrorist group ISIS (ISIL, Daesh).
On the other hand, the mullahs’ regime seeks to continue the bombardments and attacks against the Syrian people, reduced to starvation in the besieged cities of the devastated country, she said.
Ms. Atassi argued that the Iranian regime wants to use Syria as its backyard for its policy of creating a zone of influence in the region, “an axis joining the Shia extremists stretching from Tehran to Sanaa, via Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.”
She pointed out that the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has said: “If we don’t fight in Damascus and Aleppo, tomorrow we will have to fight in Tehran.”
Other Iranian regime officials have said before him that “losing Syria would be worse than if we lose an [Iranian] province”, she wrote.
Faced with the collusion of the forces of destruction, Syrian and Iranian dissidents have decided to unite to assert the rights of their peoples, Ms. Atassi said.
She pointed out that on June 11, a delegation of senior officials of the Syrian democratic opposition coalition met at the headquarters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Auvers-sur-Oise, where they sealed a “sacred union,” with Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the NCRI. “Our common goal is to oust Assad and the Iranian regime from Syria,” Ms. Atassi wrote.
The delegation of the Syrian opposition has criticized the policy of appeasement by Western powers, especially the United States, vis-à-vis the Iranian regime’s crimes in Syria, she said.
She argued that ISIS came into existence as a result of the repression of the Iraqi and Syrian people by the mullahs’ regime with the help of Assad and Nouri Al-Maliki, the former dictator of Iraq. Unfortunately, the terrorist organization ISIS is not limited to Iraq and Syria, and has reached Europe, she said.
If Tehran had not interfered in the internal affairs of Iraq and its Revolutionary Guards had not committed crimes in Syria, this harmful phenomenon would not have developed in the Middle East and terrorist attacks would not have taken place in France and in other countries, Ms. Atassi wrote.
She summed up by saying that the on July 9 at the Iranian Resistance’s major rally in Le Bourget, near Paris, the Iranian and Syrian Resistance forces became even further united.
“This show of force was that of the future forces in that region. It was an opportunity to say out loud that as long as we do not oppose the Iranian regime, we cannot eradicate the terrorism crisis in the Middle East and Europe. Because the Velayat-e Faqih (mullahs’) regime and ISIS, like Assad, are two sides of the same coin, the dark forces who are condemned to the past.”
Suhair Atassi is a member of the High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian opposition.