Iran calls out ‘hypocrisy’ of UK’s Lammy for rejoicing in fall of Assad

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has called out the “hypocrisy” of British Foreign Secretary David Lammy for rejoicing in the fall of the Syrian government and accusing President Bashar al-Assad of having the “blood of countless innocents on his hands.”

In a message posted on the social media platform X on Wednesday, Esmaeil Baghaei reminded Lammy, whom he called “an apologist for Israel by profession,” that he has been branded a “genocide denier” by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestinian territories.

He said it was “a new low” for Lammy, whose government has been persistently complicit in the “colonial erasure” of Palestinians, to be preaching about the situation in Syria and rejoicing in the “bloodshed there.”

“Mr. Lammy should be asked, among others, how much of the 'over four billion pounds' he claims the UK spent on the Syrian crisis was indeed used to 'create' and 'sustain' the crisis in the first place?” he asked.

In a statement to the House of Commons on the situation in Syria on Monday, Lammy said the current government in London refused to engage with President Assad when other governments were starting to “step up their presence in Damascus” because Assad was “a butcher with the blood of countless innocents on his hands.”

Baghaei asserted that the blood of Syrians was on the hands of those actors, including the United Kingdom, which contributed to the creation and expansion of the Daesh terrorist group in Syria and Iraq and provided the Israeli regime with lethal weapons.

“Syrian people are being pounded right now by lethal weapons that the UK has supplied to Israel,” he said.

“That's far from graceful and glorious, not even for a country that has a long history of dark settler-colonial practices accompanied by repeated genocide of indigenous and aboriginal peoples,” the spokesman added.

Armed militants, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took control of Damascus on Sunday and declared an end to President Assad’s rule in a surprise offensive that was launched from their stronghold in northwestern Syria, reaching the capital in less than two weeks.

The militants, blacklisted by the US, along with the UK and EU, have long been backed by the West and the Israeli regime to overthrow the Assad government.

Since Sunday, the Israeli military has conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Syria and pushed its troops beyond a so-called buffer zone in the occupied Golan Heights and deep into Syrian territory in what has been condemned as a new “land grab” scheme by the occupying regime.

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