Press TV has interviewed Shabbir Hassanally, an activist and Islamic scholar in London, to discuss the dire situation of tens of thousands of Syrians stranded on the Jordanian border, who are facing hunger because of the closure of the frontier between the two countries.
A rough transcription of the interview appears below.
Press TV: This goes beyond human lives being tortured in some sense, well there is inaction unless there is a plan to not let these refugees that mostly come from Syria to be in this area, forcing them perhaps to make their mind to go back to Syria because you are looking at large numbers, tens of thousands that are in dire need of food and water?
Hassanally: Yes it is a very strange position that Jordanian government has taken in denying food and water to the people inside Rukban following the attack by Daesh and realistically, if I am honest, it is not something which is surprising. We all know, the free world knows, that the Jordanian government is a client state of the Zionists, it is a client state of America and Saudi and the campaign against Syria which is not just against the Syrian government, it is explicitly against the Syrian people, and this type of event is evidence if more evidence was needed.
So they want to, I think, squeeze the Syrian people, harm the Syrian people. It is a type of, I suppose, ethnic cleansing or population control, I am not entirely sure exactly which one is the best but from the fact that the Jordanian government has decided that following this so-called attack by Daesh it wants to prevent any sort of aid getting in there, it wants to block the passage of refugees out of Rukban and through processing centers into the so-called Azraq camp which is where most of them are normally put. It is very strange. It has no logic. I mean okay, if you cannot bring them to your refugee camp, at least make sure they can get food and water but what are you doing? You are saying, ‘come, you could be refugees’ and then you put them in a concentration camp almost and kill them.
This is what those people behind the manufacture of the Zionist entity blamed the Nazis for and we can now see that allies of the Zionists are doing the same sort of activity. What Jordan is doing is no less than putting the people into camps ready for them to die. That is what they are doing in Rukban and other places.
We have also got Turkey which has blocked parts of its border and actually uses these poor refugees as target practice. So, on the one side you have got Erdogan bombing, creating the scenario where people need to escape and of course we know in Jordan many of these sorts of moderate terrorists were trained by the CIA. This is on the record. This is not something secret, it is on the record. They know that many of these so-called moderate terrorists who ultimately go and pledge their allegiance to Daesh, which is pledging their allegiance to Israel and America because that is all the same thing anyway, they all have been trained out of Jordan. This is on the record.
So you have got these two countries making a pincer movement when the refugees, poor people, they try to leave, they are also killed. So this is a campaign not only against the Syrian government, this is against the Syrian people and the governments of Jordan and the governments of Turkey and Saudi and all of these places and the Zionists need to understand that the clock is ticking. Syria will be free and believe me at that point there will be very few people that Syria trusts. The only people Syria will consider working with will be those who did not kill its people and they should forget any pipeline projects they think that they are going to be able to get through Syria.