Open Letter to Catherine Connolly about the context of her trip to Syria

Dear Deputy Connolly, you have spoken a lot in your campaign about your honesty and your dislike of hypocrisy. You have also claimed to support the Palestinian people. We, the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement, have questions. 

At the start of your presidential campaign when you were asked by Justin McCarthy on RTÉ Radio 1 about who you had met on your 2018 trip to Syria, you admitted to having met with Fares Al-Shehabi but professed not to have liked him. You did - perhaps out of electoral expediency - clearly recall having met a Limerick nun who was working there. Was it hypocrisy or dishonesty, though, that when you said you were shown around Yarmouk by "Palestinians", you omitted to mention that your guide was none other than Saed Abd Al-Aal, commander of the notorious Butcher of Yarmouk? 

It is spring 2018. The Syrian Arab Army has begun its brutal military campaign to retake the area of Eastern Ghouta, moving eastwards from Damascus, taking towns and cities already crippled by years of starvation and siege. In the Irish Parliament the previous December, your friend and close political confidante, T.D. Mick Wallace had declared his disdain for these Syrian civilians under threat, chiming perfectly with the narrative of Bashar al-Assad: "There are two opposition enclaves left. There is not a Syrian in either."

Four months later, 43 civilians are murdered by a chlorine attack on the town of Douma, the center of the anti-Assad rebellion in East Ghouta. Assad has already killed thousands of people with chemical weapons and thousands more will be slain by conventional bombing and assaults before this particular campaign is concluded.

In conjunction with a coordinated aerial and artillery bombardment, Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah militias that are the spine of Assad's army reach Harasta, northeast of Damascus. Among them are the brigades of the “Free Palestine Movement”, led by Saed Abd Al-Aal. The FPM has already achieved notoriety in the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, south of Damascus, where they operated as enforcers for the Assad regime through massacres and rape.

Now, as a young couple tries to leave Harasta through one of the so-called “humanitarian corridors”, they are "filtered out" by one of these pro-Assad militias. In a derelict commercial/industrial block, a group of men in military fatigues gather around the couple. The male is lying dead on the dusty, concrete floor, supine and naked except for blood-soaked underwear. His female partner is still alive, but her bloodied and mangled face is barely recognisable as human. One of the men is pulling her head by a metal bar inserted into her mouth. The only sounds from her are gurgles.

A few weeks later, after the chemical attack on Douma, all of Eastern Ghouta has been re-taken by the Assad regime. Around 80,000 people flee on foot; another 25,000 are transported by regime busses to Idlib in northwest Syria.

It is then, in June 2018, that you and a group of like-minded Irish politicians arrive in Damascus. Your group includes TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace, and Maureen O'Sullivan. Daly and Wallace were in Syria in October 2017, and you follow a similar itinerary to theirs on this trip.

You travel to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where you are met by businessman Fares al-Shehabi even though he is under economic sanctions by the EU for his support of the Assad regime. He is, indeed, a fervent Assadist, one of the loudest voices on social media justifying the mass killing across the country. His loyalty and propaganda almost earn him the post of Prime Minister.

In Aleppo, Shehabi seems to convince you that the devastation you see there has been caused by rebels and not by months of relentless bombardment by barrel bombs - the cheap and indiscriminate weapon of choice for Assad - and of some of the 200 types of bombs that the Russian military boasts are being"tested" in Syria.

On the outskirts of Damascus, you visit Yarmouk, the once-bustling "Palestinian Quarter" of the capital when Syrians rose up in 2011. To monitor and keep the Palestinians in line, the Assad regime established a special intelligence agency, the Palestinian Branch, and also worked with embedded Palestinian organisations.

One of these organisations was the aforementioned Free Palestine Movement. The FPM had been instrumental in imposing the years-long starvation and siege of the camp. One of its members, Mofeq al-Daouah, earned the title "The Butcher of Yarmouk", accused of multiple counts of rape and of a massacre when he fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd of camp residents queuing for humanitarian aid. In 2023, he was identified by relatives of his victims living in Germany and condemned by the courts there to life imprisonment for his crimes in Yarmouk.

Not only did Al-Aal and his murderous band enjoy immunity in Assad's Syria as they committed war crimes and atrocities. You and your fellow TDs meeting & being photographed with them legitimized and endorsed them. And although you say you were on a 'fact finding' mission, you never spoke about the facts of the horrific crimes of your hosts in Yarmouk.