Required reading for everyone who feels that "anti-imperialist principles" or realpolitik oblige them to support the Assad regime. You're just validating systematic industrial-scale rape, torture, and murder as a means of suppressing civilian dissent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/world/middleeast/syria-torture-prisons.html

what a lovely precedent it sets when large elements of the global "left" come to support something 10x worse than the Gulag, when there isn't even a dream of socialist revolution to defend (in fact, almost the only revolutionaries on the scene are among the guys getting tortured)

(oh & to those who take the "whatever the western press says about those W'rn govts dislike, the opposite must be true" position, you do realise that HR groups all said Syria applied rape, torture & murder on a mass scale EVEN BACK WHEN IT WAS A US ALLY ON THE WAR ON TERROR

the CIA actually had Al Qaeda suspects sent to Syria to be tortured. So are we supposed to believed that HR orgs claims vs Syria were true then, when Syria didn't even have a mass internal opposition, but now it's all lies & propaganda?