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Since last Saturday, when the government of Hassan Rouhani was forced to admit that his officials had been lying, and that it was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that had shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing all 176 passengers, an uprising that began last November kicked back into gear with mass protests in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, Kermanshah, Hamedan and other centres.

Photo by AFP via Getty Images

In Iraq, where an unprecedented wave of street demonstrations, strikes, marches and occupations broke out last October — at least 500 protesters slaughtered and 19,000 wounded — the scene was much the same. Long before U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the firing of a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone circling Baghdad airport in order to eliminate Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s notorious terror chief, the pro-democracy uprising had already plunged Iraq into its worst crisis since the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein 17 years ago.

In Syria, meanwhile, the Khomeinist satrap Bashar al-Assad and the Russian air force continued their immolation of the towns and cities of Idlib this week. Idlib is the last governorate of Syria outside regime control, and its conquest is the bloody denouement to what began as a pro-democracy uprising in 2011. At least 300,000 Syrians have been rendered homeless in the past few weeks. The Syrian death toll now exceeds a half million people.

The Syrian death toll now exceeds a half million people

It is against this backdrop that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plaintive appeals for “de-escalation” in the region ring hollow. Trudeau deserves credit for refusing to be goaded into blaming Trump for the downing of Flight 752, which took the lives of 57 Canadians, although by his equivocations and banalities — “If there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families” — he’s come perilously close.