I don’t know all that much about Syria, but I do know some things about Nazis. So here’s a relatively small, but not inconsequential bit of context for the despotism of the Assad regime.
Alois Brunner was a sadist and a rabid antisemite who worked closely with Adolf Eichmann to carry out the “Final Solution.” In the very few interviews he gave, decades after the war ended, Brunner said he regretted nothing except maybe failing to kill more Jews.
Brunner was able to stay in West Germany until the mid-1950s, then left (likely with an assist from the Vatican – it’s a whole thing) and settled in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez knew exactly who he was hosting. Hafez knew well enough that he took Brunner on as an “advisor,” which is to say that the Syrian regime received training in torture methods from one of the most wanted and notorious Nazi war criminals in the world, while denying Nazi hunters entry into the country.
Brunner outlived Hafez al-Assad and was still living in Syria for probably about the first ten years of Bashar al-Assad’s reign. He would’ve been rather old by then (and missing an eye and a few fingers due to Mossad assassination attempts), so I’m not sure how much “advising” he was still doing once Bashar was in power, but he obviously wasn’t turned over to The Hague, and finally died peacefully around 2010/2011 in Damascus, where he is buried. And if campist dumbfucks want to pretend that Bashar’s rule was some kind of reset, after which the Baathist regime no longer utilized what it had learned from a Nazi war criminal, then I’d like to talk to them about a lucrative (for me) real estate deal.
Some more details at the link below. Best wishes to the people of Syria.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/eichmanns-best-man-lived-and-died-in-syria/383296/