Assad’s Newest Ally: Venezuelan Congressman Goes to Syria to Fight Rebels, the U.S.
“Syria needs full support against these criminals,” wrote Venezuelan lawmaker Adel el-Zabayar in a letter to his country’s National Assembly this week. He was requesting indefinite leave from office in order to fight alongside the Syrian army, having arrived in the country two weeks ago to visit his ill mother. With the upcoming threat of military attack by the US, he has decided to stick around and fight. “Without doubt, I’ll have a weapon,” he told TIME by telephone early on Friday morning local time from a site he said was around 50 miles south of Damascus near the city of Sweida. “I’m on the battlefield now.” Zabayar has no formal weapons training and is currently carrying out more administrative tasks on the battlefield, he says, alongside government fighters.
The 49-year-old congressman, who is of Syrian descent though was born in Venezuela’s central city of Ciudad Bolívar, seems to have put himself in the firing line in accordance with his own government’s long-standing policy of friendship with the world’s pariahs. Former President Hugo Chávez, always keen to be a thorn in the side of Washington, made a point of overt friendliness with leaders despised by the West: Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He supplied diesel fuel to Syrian authorities as the unrest escalated into a full-blown civil war last year. Echoing the doctrine that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” Zabayar, a member of Chávez’s socialist party, insisted that he was “not fighting alongside the Syrian government. I’m fighting against the government of the United States.”
Zabayar expresses no remorse about the violence and casualties of the war in Syria—which has claimed more than 100,000 lives so far—and blames the US for inciting hostilities as well as engineering the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that has pushed Washington toward launching missile strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. “This is a war fabricated by countries outside. All of this was planned… The opposition launched a chemical attack in order to accuse the Syrian government of doing it.”
Zabayar appears to see Syria through rose-tinted glasses. “Despite this great international campaign against Syria, I can assure you that the Syrian people are very tranquil and getting on with life as normal,” he says. “There is total confidence in the Syrian army and government. Assad is going to survive.”
Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/08/30/assads-newest-ally-venezuelan-congressman-goes-to-syria-to-fight-rebels-the-u-s/
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