‘US bombing Syria to force people to migrate to Europe’

The high civilian death toll from recent US airstrikes on Syrian territories has drawn a lot of anger and criticism. Press TV has talked to author and former diplomat from Washington, Michael Springmann, and former US ambassador to Syria from New York, Richard Murphy, about the reasons behind American military intervention in the Arab country.

Michael Springmann believes that American authorities are pursuing two objectives in their Syria operation. For one thing, he said, they want to drive Syrian people out of their homeland, and for another, they intend to use the Syrian refugees as a tool to make European unstable.

“The whole purpose of American activity in its aggressive, unconstitutional and illegal war against Syria is basically to terrorize,” the author told Press TV’s ‘The Debate’ program on Sunday night.

“They want to drive out the people of Syria to dehouse, deculturalize, destabilize and destroy the country and its people, and drive them into Europe and create more problems there,” he added.

According to the analyst, “The whole point of the American government’s action there is to show that the people of Syria are not protected by their government [and] that foreign powers such as the United States, such as Turkey [and] such as Israel, can enter the country and engage in warfare with impunity.”

Springmann further called for action against the United States for its war crimes in Syria.

“Nothing is going to be done to force the United States to stop its murderous attacks on the civilians of Syria,” he said, noting, “Until the American people will rise up and say ‘Enough is enough. We are not going to pay for murder and war crimes and human rights violations’ and hold some politicians to account, it is going to continue regrettably.”

The panelist also criticized Western governments and mainstream media for reacting differently to civilian deaths in the West and in Syria as discriminatory behavior.

“The British worry about terrorism in Manchester but they say nothing about their own terrorism in Syria, their own terrorism in Libya and their own terrorism in Iraq or Yugoslavia,” he argued.

The airstrikes by the US and its allies left a total of 225 civilians dead in Syria between April 23 and May 23 alone, according to latest figures released by the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). 

Read More: 

• US airstrikes kill 20 civilians in Syria's Raqqah
• US-led air raids kill 117 civilians in eastern Syria

Meanwhile, Richard Murphy confirmed that there has been a sharp increase in civilian casualties in the last month as the US air attacks have targeted fleeing Daesh terrorists in Syria.

He went on to say, “The civilian losses are a strategic negative for the United States,” which have increased because of diminished local cooperation against the Daesh militant group and “it gives ammunition to the militants’ propaganda that America is intent on destroying civilian life not fighting ISIS (Daesh).”

The former diplomat commented that “the American leadership is trying to bring this war to the earliest possible conclusion,” reasoning that the intensification of US attacks “should be seen as the effort to end the conflict.”

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