An article in The San Diego Union-Tribune posted on December 22, 2016

Link to the article

UN. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has called my hometown of Aleppo a synonym of hell. “The Problem from Hell,” the title of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power’s award-winning book, intended to describe the U.S. inaction in Bosnia, now describes my hometown of Aleppo. Despite six years of empty rhetoric, my city is currently witnessing sectarian cleansing that has ironically unfolded under Ms. Power’s own watch.

In the past week, I have spoken to family and friends inside Aleppo as I watched reports of the Assad regime killing entire families all at once, women committing suicide to avoid being raped by Assad’s forces, young men being rounded up and continued indiscriminate airstrikes.

I can’t help but dwell over the number of times this administration has made statements that it did not follow with action.

The rising isolationist sentiment in the U.S. may appear as a reasonable justification for the Obama administration abrogation of the Syrian people’s rights to a representative democracy.

However, the Obama administration was by no means Switzerland when dealing with Syria. The Obama administration implemented one of the largest covert CIA programs ultimately contributing to the destruction of Syria while, intentionally or otherwise, ensuring the survival of an Assad dictatorship.

To add insults to our overwhelming pain, President Obama mocked the suffering of the Syrian people during a recent news conference by essentially saying he could not hold his red line “on the cheap.” As if he knows the ultimate price of 500,000 murdered civilians, 12 million displaced refugees and the resulting destabilized Middle East and Europe.

In 2012, I met Ms. Power at the White House, informing her of my fears that Assad would follow through on his threats to annihilate his population like germs. I, among other Syrian-Americans, was assured at the time that the United States stands with freedom and democracy and would never allow massacres to happen.

At that time, none of us Syrian-Americans fathomed that a U.S. president would talk big and loud but carry a toothpick.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009, Mr. Obama made the following statement, “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

His words have proved true, six years into missed opportunities of inaction that empowered the Assad regime’s mass atrocities against the Syrian people. If Mr. Obama’s words have meanings then he must have concluded that “more costly intervention later” is better strategy than limited actions now.

Obama has stood idly by and allowed Assad and his partners, Iran and Russia, to create the largest humanitarian and refugee crisis since World War II. His inactions created the power vacuum that allowed the rise of extremist Islamist organizations like ISIS who are now threatening the globe and granted the ayatollah of Iran hegemony over Southwest Asia extending from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean.

Today, over 100,000 civilians are being religiously cleansed from eastern Aleppo primarily by Iranian and Hezbollah mercenaries under a cease-fire agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey. Russian air power coupled with Iranian-backed militias now play a central role in enforcing Syria’s sieges and both countries participate in overseeing local forces surrender and displacement negotiations.

The pictures of thousands of the people of my city being forcibly displaced from their homes for no crime but seeking liberty are a stain on the world conscience. The world made a commitment of “never again” after the Holocaust, Srebrenica and Rwanda. Make no mistake, President Obama can end these mass atrocities with a single credible threat of force to push the regime to stop massacring civilians, yet he refuses.

As President Obama watches on while Syrians are slaughtered and are subjected to forced displacement, Ms. Power’s old “problem from hell” is now a reality and yet to be a written history. In her book, she wrote about the refusal of public officials to even resign in protest of the Clinton administration’s inaction in the Balkans, yet she continues to serve in an administration that refuses to act.

The least Ms. Power can do for Aleppo is to resign in protest of this shameful policy. History will record her, like Obama, as complicit in these crimes against humanity.

Alagha, a longtime resident of San Diego County, is national chairman of the Syrian American Council, a nonprofit Syrian American advocacy organization that advocates for a free and democratic Syria. The organization’s website is http://www.sacouncil.com.