Policy of targeted killings in Damascus

Sheikh Mohammed Ahmad Sadeq, Imam of the Anas Bin Malek mosque in the al-Midane neighborhood of Damascus, was shot dead by an armed terrorist group on Thursday, February 16.

In a recent sermon, the Sunni cleric condemned calls by the opposition to sabotage Syria.

He had urged the Ulama of Damascus to sit around the same table to issue a statement appealing for an end violence, regardless of the source.

Sheikh Sadeq, who held a doctorate in Islamic law, was married and had four children, one girl and three boys.

On Saturday, February 11, unidentified gunmen had assassinated brigadier general and doctor Issa al-Khawli, director of Hamich hospital, outside his home in the northeast of the capital. The general was the father of three girls and a boy.

A report, published 3 March 2009, by the U.S. State Department’s human rights section gave a small glimpse of the practice of targeted killings in Muslim countries.

According to the document, Israeli and foreign agents sent by Mossad, in cooperation with the United States, have killed at least 350 Iraqi scientists and more than 200 academic figures and university professors, in addition to hundreds of pilots, officers and engineers.

The principal mission of these "death squads", which have operated in Iraq since 2003, was to bribe Iraqi specialists and, in case of refusal, to eliminate them.

As we had anticipated in December, while it had originally applied the humanitarian military intervention scenario that had worked in Libya and Yugoslavia, NATO must review its script for Syria in the face of the double veto. Now, it’s a question of applying the same strategy which used in Iraq, i.e. weakening the country until the next opportunity to attack crops up.