Vindicated: It is Not a Crime to Care

(In memory of the shaheed Dr Abbas Khan who was executed by the Assad regime in a Syrian prison on 16 December 2003)

December 2024 will forever be remembered by Syrians, both inside and outside the country, as the month not only when the Assad dynasty was toppled, but also the time when their loved ones were finally freed from the underground dungeons of the former regime. In historic scenes that will become the defining image of the liberation of Syria, multinational mujahideen brigades entered city after city rescuing tens of thousands of prisoners - men, women and children - from prisons that had come to epitomise the brutality of Assad’s rule. Aleppo, Homs, Hama until they arrived at the notorious Saydnaya Military Prison. Saydnaya – a word that became synonymous with horrific torture, rape, systematic degradation and mass executions.

That some freed detainees still believed that Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez, who died 24 years ago, was still ruling the country demonstrates the extent to which prisoners were kept in complete isolation. That mothers, childless when detained, emerged from the darkness with children who could not understand simple concepts such as that of a tree or a bird, should shock the conscience of the world. There was a reason why former CIA agent Robert Baer said in relation to the American extraordinary rendition programme, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.”

But what of the men who devoted over a decade of their lives in the struggle to overthrow Assad and liberate these prisoners, many of whom are not even Syrian but who travelled there from all over the world, motivated by the command of their Lord to fight for the oppressed and by the orders of their prophet to free the prisoners? For 11 years, these men were classified asterrorists, not just by Assad but in a rare display of unity, also by the British, American, Russian and Iranian governments. The label ‘terrorism’ has the intended effect of deporting its bearer beyond the normal boundaries of the rule of law, due process, and basic humanity. Assad tortured the ‘terrorists’. The US, Russia and Iran launched airstrikes on the ‘terrorists’.

Today, they stand vindicated and venerated for their struggle and sacrifices. But cast your mind back to just over a decade ago when Abdul Waheed Majid, a 41 year old father of three, blew himself up with a truck laden with explosives outside the gates of a Syrian regime prison in Aleppo in an attempt to free those inside. Far from being lauded for his willingness to sacrifice his own life for the freedom of others, he was widely castigated as ‘Britain’s first suicide bomber’. Majid’s brother later spoke about how he had been moved by reports and images of thousands of tortured and executed prisoners in Syria that had been smuggled out of the country by a defected military police photographer. His actions were no less praiseworthy than those carried out by his comrades who survived him and would proceed to liberate Saydnaya 10 years later. It is an undisputable fact that no amount of public protests, petitions or private lobbying came even close to securing what the ‘terrorists’ achieved by the use of armed force.

Yet, the head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service at the time, Sue Hemming, said that it was a crime to fight in another country even if it was to topple a “loathsome” dictator such as Assad, and that prosecutions would be considered against not just those who attended training camps in Syria but even those who had not even left the UK but were taking steps to do so. Hemming was true to her word with Mashudur Chouhdury becoming the first person in Britain to be convicted of terrorism related offences in connection with Syria despite the CPS admitting in court that they did not know for sure what exactly Choudhury did during his time in Syria. Following the verdict, Assistant Chief Constable Brendan O' Dowda issued the following warning: “Anyone thinking of travelling to fight jihad against the Assad regime, think again. You are likely to be killed or kidnapped and if you return to the UK you are highly likely to be arrested.”

In the same year DAC Helen Ball launched a campaign urging mothers and wives to spy on their husbands and sons and report any suspicions of their intentions to travel to Syria to them.Yet at the same time, the police would arrest family members of individuals who had travelled to Syria on allegations that they had failed to disclose information to them. Mothers like Majida Sarwar who did report her son to the police in the hope of persuading him to return home report feeling betrayed when he was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Those who remained in Syria were stripped of their citizenship rendering them de facto stateless and left in exile on the vague allegation of allying themselves with a group that was aligned with al-Qaeda. It was because of this very repression that CAGE launched its ‘Is it a Crime to Care?’ campaign. If this nameless group is indeed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the same jihad group that the British government is now looking to deproscribe from the list of banned terrorist organisations, it does raise the question as to whether citizenship should be reinstated for such individuals.

Majid, Choudhury, Sarwar, Sharif and others were motivated to leave everything behind to fight in a just war against tyranny and to liberate tens of thousands of political prisoners. They were denigrated and maligned as terrorists for doing so. Yet, even after celebrating the fall of Assad at the hands of their comrades-in-arms, Keir Starmer bizarrely called on them to reject ‘terrorism and violence’, as if diplomatic efforts constituted a worthy competitor. Those efforts were wholly insufficient to save the life of Dr Abbas Khan, a British physician and father of two, who was imprisoned by Assad for one year before being executed on 16 December 2013. Had the mujahideen been supported, or at least not criminalised, in their struggle against Assad, perhaps Dr Khan could have been alive to witness and celebrate Syrian freedom today. The victory today is only possible because of the blood and sacrifices of people like Dr Khan and the countless others who were willing to break the law to save a people from genocide.