Loading ...Some Rhode Islanders of Syrian descent support Assad’s rule
By Mark Reynolds
Providence Journal
To President Donald Trump, Bashar Assad is an “animal” who killed children with sarin gas in northern Syria last week.
But to Thomas Lazieh, a former Central Falls mayor, Syria’s president is the target of “unsubstantiated” allegations that originated in territory controlled by rebels and terrorists, and his regime is a “duly elected government.”
To Human Rights Watch, the Assad government has killed, displaced and terrorized thousands of civilians, including children, in a “murderous” air bombing campaign.
But to Pamela Azar, a retired public school civics teacher, Assad has been a defender of Syria’s minorities, including her own Christian relatives.
Lazieh and Azar say that Assad has similar support from other Syrians in Rhode Island, many of them Christians.
“… Many, many Christians and other Syrians support his efforts,” says Lazieh, a Central Falls councilman and church leader. “Is he a perfect leader? No. But he’s the best that they have there now.”
Lazieh, 58, and about 100 other Rhode Islanders belong to a group called the Syrian American Forum. The group protested in Boston last week after U.S. missiles struck a Syrian air base.
Other Rhode Islanders also expressed support for Assad during interviews with The Journal in recent days, but withheld their names, citing safety concerns.
Azar, 59, who grew up in the United States but has lived in Syria for months at time, says she “trusts” Assad.
“I know that sounds naive,” she says, but Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, protected her relatives and other Christians after he took power in 1970, she says.
Bashar al-Assad inherited his father’s government. He fought against the Arab Spring uprising of 2011. Azar calls it the “Arab Winter” because she says it led to an unending war, not liberal Western-style democracy.
Many Syrians blame Assad for that war. Assad and his supporters, including some in Rhode Island, hold the Islamic State and other terrorist groups responsible.
Last month, a United Nations human rights inquiry accused fighters on both sides of the conflict of brutal tactics “that amount to war crimes.” Syrian government forces, said the rights commission, employed starvation and other “brutal siege tactics … reminiscent of medieval warfare.”
Azar and Lazieh say the regime was, and is, a necessary secular force that protects minority communities from militant Islamists.
“It seems to me that the people in the region were always dominated by a strong ruler, and without a strong ruler, chaos would ensue,” says Azar, adding that she knows dozens of Rhode Islanders who share the same view.
About 30 Rhode Islanders marched with the Syrian American Forum in Boston over the weekend, says Salah Asfoura, 57, an architect in Worcester, Massachusetts, who says Trump’s attack might have helped the Islamic State. Americans aren’t getting all of the facts from Fox News and CNN, says Asfoura, who is a member of the forum’s board of trustees.
Like Lazieh, many of Rhode Island’s Assad supporters are descendants of Syrian immigrants who found work in Rhode Island’s textile mills. Lazieh says his father fled Aleppo, a textile city, in 1921, when the family feared it would get swept up in a genocide of Christians.
On Wednesday night, a handful of Rhode Islanders of Syrian ethnicity expressed support for Assad as Lazieh greeted them on their way to church in Lincoln.
“I support him,” said one woman, who declined to give her name. “He is a very nice president.”
Gesturing with his arms to make his point, another churchgoer said too many Americans are unwilling to “look around” and survey the entire situation.
“They don’t like to get the truth,” he says. “They like to get it their way and no other way.”
