Don't Honor Abusers of Human Rights With the attack last week that killed 17 people at a school in Parkland, Florida, it is easy to miss the humanitarian crisis that occurred across the globe in Syria. On Tuesday, hundreds of civilians, including children, died when Syria's government and its allies executed a direct strike on a rebel stronghold in eastern Ghouta -- where Syrian forces used sarin in 2013, killing an estimated 1,500 people. The bloody faces of small children are all too familiar in this vicious war by Bashar Assad and his Iranian and Russian allies, who are intent on keeping him in power. More than 5 million people have fled the regime. Another 6 million have been displaced within Syria. And hundreds of thousands of people have died in the civil war. Though this carnage has drawn condemnation from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, as long as Assad's partners in crimes against humanity, Russia and Iran, continue to supply arms and fighters to th...

Rep. Deutch:Half a million Syrians are dead and millions more have fled their country as a result of Iran’s support 4 Bashar Assad #IRGCOut

Defeating ISIS isn’t enough: Trump urgently needs a new Syria policy By Anne Pierce Ph.D., Fox News In Syria, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of people remain displaced and countless souls are physically and psychologically scarred. Throngs of children are without families or homes, entire villages and farming communities no longer exist, and cities are in ruins.  Fallout from the seismic Syrian civil war and upheaval besets the Middle East. Aggressor regimes and extremist groups have capitalized upon the chaos and despair.  It will be very difficult at this late juncture to get America’s Syria policy right, but the moral and strategic stakes are too high to keep getting it wrong. Instead of slouching toward a fatally flawed paradigm, the Trump administration should conduct an urgent policy review, such as it did for North Korea and Iran.  U.S. efforts in Syria are hampered by a narrow focus on defeating ISIS and corollary downplay...

Maryam Rajavi to Italy: Support the Iranian Resistance, Not the Regime London, 19 Oct - The President-her of the Iranian Resistance Forces has made a  statement  for the Italian Senate arguing that support for the Resistance is key in the fight for global peace and security. Maryam Rajavi, who leads the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which serves as a government-in-exile, expressed her gratitude that the Italian government had underscored the need to confront the Iranian Regime. She said: “You have pinpointed an issue on which the world’s peace and security, the Middle East’s liberation from war, terrorism and instability, and the Iranian people’s freedom, all depend.” Decades of the international community turning a blind eye to the oppression of the Iranian people has led to the Regime spreading its fundamentalism far beyond its own borders and posing a threat to the world at large; contributing to the rise of Sunni terrorist cells like ISIS and ...

Crisis-riddled Iran Sees Opposition Elect New Secretary General As Iran  finds  itself engulfed in domestic and external turmoil, the opposition in-exile enjoys the prowess and cohesion to  elect  a new secretary general. A new administration in Washington has  been  ramping up the heat, punishing Tehran for  meddling  in other states’ affairs and advancing its ballistic missile drive. All the while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has seen his representative  rejected  by two senior Shiite leaders in Iraq, the proxy war in  Yemen  going south and Tehran’s support to maintain Syria’s Bashar Assad in power eating up crucial resources. Internally, the Iranian people are stepping up their  protests  to significant scales. In now daily protests thousands of  investors  are demanding their savings from state-run institutions, and the city of Baneh in western Iran recently witnessed clashes as locals ...

Iran is not the Middle East’s North Korea — it is worse Kim Jong-Un, Ali Khamenei and mushroom cloud Dr. Majid Rafizadeh Arab News, 4 October 2017  - Analogies have been made that the Iranian regime is the Middle East’s North Korea. Such an analogy fails to comprehensively characterize Tehran’s role in the region, as well as identify the differences between North Korea and Iran. When it comes to their roles within their respective regions, the Iranian regime plays a much more destabilizing and destructive role than North Korea does. Through its military forces, the Islamic Republic is actively engaged in intervening in the domestic affairs of other nations in the Middle East. For example, in Syria, Iranian leaders have admitted that their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite branch, the Quds Force, are fighting on the ground alongside Bashar Assad’s forces. In addition, Iran is providing financial, weapons, advisory and intelligence assis...