'A Syrian refugee who fled to the UK has called for British intervention in the Middle East as global tensions reached fever pitch.
Hassan Akkad, whose journey from Damascus to London was documented and broadcast by theBBC in 2016, has called for a "surgical strike" against Bashar Al-Assad's regime.
A secondary school teacher, Mr Akkad took part in the first anti-government protests in 2011 - during the Arab Spring - and was imprisoned twice, where he was tortured, resulting in both wrists and one leg being broken.
He now lives in Brixton but hopes to one day return to Syria.
"Attacking Assad is different to bombing Syria. This is going to be a strike on the regime - not the victims. This needs to be a specific, surgical strike to deter him from using chemical weapons again in the future. If we do not intervene we could be witnessing a genocide. We didn't intervene in 2013 and the problems have just continued."
Asked his thoughts on MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Vince Cable's calls for a Commons vote on intervention, he denied a strike would constitute a "rush to war".
"Of course it's not a rush to war - the war's been going on since 2011. By definition, the UK has not rushed in to help. I am tired of people - on the Right and the Left - saying they know what is best for Syria. We started this revolution in 2011."
Comparing the deaths of Syrian civilians to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury earlier this year, he said: "I know a lot of Syrians who are now just beginning to feel like their lives are worthless. We saw two Russians poisoned in Salisbury and it sent shockwaves around the entire world - but thousands of Syrians have suffered for nearly a decade and nothing. Our suffering has become old news. This really is the last straw." '
"My message to the international community is that you should be ashamed. You are as guilty as Assad, and Putin, and Iran, for the atrocities in Syria, for more than seven years. More than 700,000 people got killed, and millions displaced. It's not just about the chemical weapons. I lived for two years under siege and bombardment. I used to eat from the trash cans, alongside the other civilians under siege; just like the people in Douma in Eastern Ghouta, who have been enduring siege for many years.
I would tell the international community: you should do something, right now, to save whoever's left in Douma. People are forced to flee, women will be detained and raped, men will be slaughtered, children will be killed, just as they do each and every time. Because it happened in my town. I survived it.
I ask Ambassador Nikki Haley to resign. Because two months ago, I went to her office in New York, and I told her assistants that my friends on the ground are telling me that the Assad régime is planning on a large-scale chemical weapons attack. All that they did was ignore me."
'The "supporting countries" are interested in keeping the Syrian factions weak and scattered "in order to make it easy to drive them and ensure their loyalty," Dr. Abdel Moneim Zinedine, General Co-ordinator of Revolutionary factions said.
"They were able to use the support card to unite them, but they used it to disperse them, and it was not enough for them. They are using to take the factions distinction to justify avoiding their duty to support the Syrian people," Zinedine said.
"The Syrian people would have appreciated the countries' greatest support they would have had if they had prevented Iran, its militias, Russia and its forces backing the Assad regime , and let the people fight against the Assad gang that surely would not have survived if these countries had provided an air defense system to protect their children and women from massacres. Simply, if they had stopped the secret support and given up protecting this very regime. "
States supporting the Syrian factions continue to refrain from supplying them with anti-aircraft weapons. In late 2017, the United States suspended its support program for military factions, under which it provided anti-tank missiles (TOW).
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who spoke about the necessity of "Assad being strong and not a puppet of Iran," recently received widespread discontent in the Syrian circles, considering that Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that adopted the demand to overthrow the Assad regime. In 2011.'
