Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was in Damascus this weekend, celebrating his nation’s brotherhood with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. While the two regimes are bonded by economic cooperation, their kinship today flows from a less auspicious predilection.
Namely, genocide against innocent Muslims.
Evincing as much, China’s Global Times propaganda outlet reported Assad had said, “Syria supports China unconditionally” on its policies in the Xinjiang province. The shared affinity for annihilation goes beyond rhetorical support.
Since the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, Assad has deliberately starved, gassed, barrel-bombed, and gunned down at least 120,000 civilians (likely 300,000+ civilians). Assad’s particular focus has fallen on smashing Sunni heartlands, such as the Hama, Aleppo, and Idlib governorates.
Instead of targeting rebel forces, Assad and his Iranian-Russian allies have deliberately blown up hospitals, markets, schools, and other elements of critical civilian infrastructure. They have intended to terrorize a suffering population into subjugation and surrender.
Their disregard for innocent life has been defining. And their ideological motive is distinctly sectarian: ensuring the political primacy of the Assad-aligned Alawite political bloc over a long-oppressed Sunni supermajority.
It’s easy to understand, then, why Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party finds such easy affection with Assad.
After all, China has now forced more than 2 million of its innocent Uygur citizens, the vast majority of them Muslim, into concentration camps. Once there, these citizens have been brutally stripped of their culture and faith.
Some are forcibly sterilized or used as rape prostitutes. Others have been murdered.
All have been force-fed Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Things don’t get a whole lot better for the inmates when they’re released.
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been sent hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from their families to be used as forced labor. This genocide does not find much interest from Islamic regimes.
Yet, when it comes to China and Syria, the bond isn’t built upon closing a blind eye to each other’s abuse. Instead, in Jinping and Assad, we see the natural kinship of killers.
Bathed in innocent blood and driven by an authoritarian lust for power, these two despots are natural allies.
