The following may explain my abiding interest in the current phase of the Syrian question. I have described elsewhere my many criticisms of the Assad state, for its support of terrorism here, for its Judophobia, for its sheltering of the Nazi war-criminal Alois Brunner, and for its ruthless crushing of opposition. Those planning to claim falsely that I am an apologist for Assad, to avoid my arguments, should read this before levelling this wholly false charge:

http://dailym.ai/2h1XZAv

My concern about the strange Western and Gulf intervention there also dates quite a long way back, perhaps because I have long been concerned about this interesting part of the Middle East. I wrote the following item in my Mail on Sunday column on 10th June 2012. I should add that the people who contacted me have long ago fled from the violence which made their lives miserable and dangerous. I had several later communications describing the horrible destruction of what had until then been an orderly and reasonably prosperous way of life, though of course wholly lacking the freedoms of speech and politics we take for granted here and supervised (like all middle-eastern countries) by a ruthless and feared secret police.

I checked with friends of theirs still in England, to establish that they were who they said they were, non-political western women, unconnected to the government, married to secular Sunni Syrians and living in the Latakia area. They got in touch with me after I had written critically about what seemed to me to be unwarranted enthusiasm, at the BBC, for a civil war in Syria:

'I HAVE been contacted by a group of Western women who live in Syria and who believe that most of what the world is being told about that country is false.



As far as I can discover, they are not stooges of what they agree to be a rather nasty government in Damascus, but exactly what they say they are: normal human beings caught up in a political tornado.



For obvious reasons, I have promised to protect their identities. I urge you to read what follows, because it is important, because our emotional interventions in other countries never do any good, and because it is vital that people resist attempts to drag us into Syria, too, by feeding us one-sided atrocity propaganda.



This sort of propaganda has a price.



I hope you have noticed the continuing tally of deaths of selfless British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a cause long ago abandoned.



And I hope you have also noticed that Libya, 'rescued' by us a few months ago, is now a failed state whose main international airport was recently taken over by gangsters, and where unjustly arrested prisoners are starved and tortured in secret dungeons.



One of my informants from Syria writes of the 'activists' we hear so much about: 'These protesters are not peaceful, flower-carrying people wanting freedom.



No, they are weapon-toting killers who snipe, who ambush, who fire upon the army with the sole purpose of inciting riot and mayhem.'



She blames Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria's minorities of Alawites and Christians.



She says many of the 'activists' are foreigners, a view shared by all my informants. Many of the 'activists' are armed.



Armed intervention is in fact well under way, uncondemned by the UN, which readily attacks the Syrian government for defending itself.



Another writes: 'I have seen reports of opposition rallies which showed pictures of pro-government rallies, and reports purporting to be from the north Syrian countryside, where it has been an incredibly wet year, which appear to have been taken in some desert.



The news being accepted as truth by BBC World News is so biased these days that I no longer believe what they say about anything any more, after more than 60 years of crediting them with the truth.'



She says she has spoken to a man who took part in a march at Hama last summer. He 'was worried for his safety, but was given a red rose to carry and assured the whole thing would be calm and orderly, and seeing many other men from the mosque joining in with their small sons, he agreed.



They walked for a very few minutes, the unarmed police watching them from the wayside, then a man next to him pulled out a gun and shot the nearest policeman dead.'



A riot followed, reported by foreign TV stations as a police attack on peaceful marchers.



I expect to have more to say on this in weeks to come. '

So it proved. I heard from these informants, for the first time, of the presence of foreign fighters in Syria, men whose Arabic was not local, and who wore the moustacheless beards of the Islamist devotee, uncommon in her part of the world until then.