This is a direct appeal to the Russian leadership, and to President Vladimir Putin personally, about Syria: the only true ally Russia ever had, an ally Russia sold cheaply to NATO member Turkey, and handed to Israel for free.
The Petition:
We, the Syrian people, joined by people of conscience everywhere, call on President Vladimir Putin to pick up the phone to his friend, the head of Al Qaeda HTS in Syria, Al Jolani, and get him to declare a general amnesty now, freeing every political prisoner, including all ranks of the Syrian Arab Army, former state officials, and the Muslim clergy of all sects.
Reason for the Petition:
On orders passed down through their own command centers, and after more than 13.5 years fighting terrorists on hundreds of fierce battles on more than 40 open fronts, the Syrian Armed Forces, the Syrian Arab Army in full, the security agencies, and the staff of the Ministries of Interior and Defense, all laid down their weapons and walked away from their posts without firing a shot at the advancing Al Qaeda HTS terrorists. They avoided a bloodbath that day, only to pay for it later: hunted, persecuted, and massacred, along with their families, by the very people they refused to fight.
How did US-led, NATO-sponsored, Russia-approved Al Qaeda HTS terrorists take over an entire country without a fight? How did President Bashar al-Assad and his family vanish, only for Russian authorities to later claim, with no proof of life, that they had taken refuge in Russia? Syrians have every reason to believe the answer lies in the deal struck between Russian and Turkish officials at that now-infamous meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey, and Iran in Doha, Qatar, in December 2024.
Back in 2007, Qatar and its Western handlers offered President Bashar Al Assad the world, literally, in exchange for letting a gas pipeline run from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria on its way to European markets. Had Assad said yes, Syria would have pocketed 14 billion US dollars in cash on the spot, kept a share of the gas passing through its own territory, collected transit fees on every cubic meter pumped through, and opened the door to Western and Gulf investment in the massive gas fields off the Syrian coast in the Eastern Mediterranean and in central Syria.
President Assad turned the offer down because it would have strangled the already struggling economies of Russia and Iran. Instead, he proposed his own vision: the Five Seas Economic Zone, inviting the countries around the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Gulf, and the Caspian into the richest, most powerful economic bloc on earth. For that, he was warned, directly and unmistakably, that Syria would be destroyed and turned into a failed state if he didn’t fall in line. His counter-offer was rejected by friends before foes. When Assad told Putin about the plot, Putin promised Russia would stand by Syria if that threat ever became real, and offered Syria Russia’s most advanced weapons. The Syrian Arab Army wasted no time: it asked for the S300 air defense systems, along with everything else it needed to defend the country against the coming aggression from the US-led NATO ‘defensive’ alliance and its client states.
Instead, Putin broke his word. In 2010, on instructions from Israel’s Netanyahu, he withheld the S300 systems Syria desperately needed, leaving the country exposed to repeated US and Israeli attacks. Putin had assured Assad that Russia would defend Syria against any direct invasion or serious NATO aggression, but Russia kept failing to show up, even in 2013, when the US, under war criminal and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, threatened to bomb Syria over the Ghouta chemical attack, a false flag carried out by NATO-sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists, instead of fulfilling his promise, Putin pressured Syria to give up its last deterring chemical weapons stockpile it kept in the face of the Israeli nuclear, chemical, and bio-weapons of mass destruction.
In 2019, Putin broke his word again. Under the Idlib Agreement, Russia and Iran stood as guarantors that Turkey would pull its troops out of northern Syria. Instead, that agreement was used to stop the Syrian Arab Army in its tracks. The SAA was on the verge of liberating the rest of Idlib, the last Al Qaeda stronghold in the country, when it was ordered to stand down, giving Erdogan, the Turkish madman and enemy of true Islam, more time to manage the thousands of Al Qaeda fighters he had nurtured in that northwestern province on Turkey’s border. Russian pressure on Damascus let the ever-hypocritical Erdogan expand the Turkish military presence there, not to withdraw his terrorists as the agreement he signed required, but to protect them.
Russia kept pressuring Damascus to scale back the Iranian military presence that was helping the SAA fight terrorists. Meanwhile, Israel kept striking Iranian military and counter-terrorism advisors across the country with pinpoint accuracy, while Russian radars conveniently saw nothing. Together, these two facts exposed Syria even further to intervention by NATO member states and the terrorist groups operating under NATO’s command.
At the very moments Syria desperately needed the S300 and had to rely on the Syrian Arab Army outdated air defense systems to shoot down most incoming Tomahawks and other missiles with what it had, at the very moments Syrian air defense crews, through sheer heroism, shot down an Israeli F16 and damaged an Israeli F35 using outdated Soviet-era equipment, Putin was busy touring the world offering the far more advanced S400 to everyone except Syria. He offered it to Turkey, a NATO member and an enemy of both Syria and Russia, and to Qatar, India, Saudi Arabia, and anyone else who wanted one, or didn’t.
Putin never helped Syria develop its own natural resources as promised. He never sent a single barrel of oil or a cubic meter of gas to a country in desperate need, even as the US Army looted Syrian oil and gas from fields 6,000 kilometers from American soil. And as if that weren’t enough, Putin then promised to make Turkey the regional gas hub instead.
All of this while Syria carried the burden alone, fighting tens of thousands of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and their affiliates and handlers from every Western ‘intelligence’ agency on the ground. Putin himself justified Russia’s entry into the war in September 2015 by saying it was better to fight the terrorists in Syria than on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. And yet Russia ended up playing the leading role in turning its only faithful ally, the last secular country in the region, into the failed state it is today, ruled by the very groups Putin claimed he wanted to fight in Syria rather than in Russia.
Russia abandoned Syria to protect Israel and to help Erdogan, the neo-Ottoman sultan wannabe, rebuild his despised Ottoman empire in the Arab world. Putin then went further, welcoming and effectively endorsing the head-chopping leader of Al Qaeda HTS in Moscow itself. That alone places a humanitarian responsibility on Russia, quite apart from any bond of friendship between the Syrian and Russian peoples, to ask Putin’s new friends in Al Qaeda HTS, now ruling Syria, to declare a general amnesty and free every political prisoner immediately.
Russia is no stranger to demanding amnesty. Its envoys pressured President Assad’s government repeatedly to grant one, even while those same terrorists were carrying out horrific massacres against Syrians across the country. Thousands of Al Qaeda fighters walked free under the so-called ‘Reconciliation‘ process, overseen by officers of the Russian Army itself.
We are asking Mr. Putin, the Russian Security Council, the Russian Duma, and the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy to step in now and demand this general amnesty. Syrian officials, army personnel, and even the clergy, including Syria’s last Grand Mufti, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, are being tortured, persecuted, threatened with execution, and in many cases murdered in the most horrific ways.
Russia can simply ask its friend Erdogan, the man it sold Syria to so cheaply, to order the amnesty from the Al Qaeda HTS he has sponsored for a decade and a half. Or Russia can ask its friends in Israel to instruct their own asset, Al Qaeda HTS leader Jolani, to issue it. After all, Putin’s most cherished goal, securing Israel, has already been achieved with the destruction of the secular Syrian state.
If Russia won’t consider any of that, then at the very least, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, entrusted by the world to safeguard peace and security, it should demand the general amnesty, the immediate release of every kidnapped political prisoner, and real protection for the Syrian people.
That is the very least Russia owes the Syrian people after two decades of betrayal, backstabbing, and broken commitments to the only true ally it ever had.
On behalf of the Syrian people,
Arabi Souri
Publisher, Syria News
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