Many local eyewitness accounts say that the Syrian jihadist mass killings targeting Alawites and Christians along Syria's coast in Latakia and Tartous governates is continuing, even as the mainstream media has largely stopped covering the massacres. The killings began on a large-scale last Friday and appear to have continued, despite denials from Damascus.

For example, well-known Mideast regional correspondent said Tuesday - at a time when many thought the killings were over - "I just got an urgent message from somebody in Baniyas, Syria telling me that gunmen are RIGHT NOW spotted in the small Alawite village of Al Sin, close to Huraysun & 10 km north of Baniyas. Gunmen roaming through the village. Civilians terrified, hiding in houses & nearby fields."

Tens of thousands of persecuted Syrian civilians are currently seeking the safety of both northern Lebanon and Russia's Kmeimim Air Base, as we documented earlier. In some cases, troops from Jolani's ruling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as well as foreign fighters are approaching the gates of the base as they hunt down Alawites and non-Sunni 'heretics'.

Syria's self-declared President Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) is paying lip-service to 'investigations' into the killings, and has called for a halt to the attacks on religious minorities. Apparently this is good enough for the European Union, as Sharaa has just been invoved to address a European Commission donor's conference. 

"Syria's foreign minister Asaad al-Shibani is set to attend a donor summit for his country in Brussels on March 17, a European official told Reuters on Wednesday, the first time Syria will be formally represented at the yearly conference," Reuters reports.

"The official said that Syria's interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa was not expected to be at the donor meeting, after a Syrian source and two diplomats had told Reuters he was expected there."

But the fact that his government will be represented, and that Jolani was directly invited - despite still being deemed by the US and many Western governments a terrorist, and at a moment his forces are slaughtering innocent civilians - is a deep irony and an absurd outrage.

The European Union has of course long been on Washington's regime change bandwagon in Syria, which included the Gulf monarchies as well as Israel. The EU just began lifting some sanctions on Syria, but only in the wake of Assad's December 8 ouster.

The reality remains that the only country involved in Syria which seems focused on actually protecting Alawites, Christians and Druze is Russia. Their coastal base is now an encampment for some 10,000 people who have fled Jolani's death squads.

Even the ultra-establishment Economist recently admitted that Jolani is the "great pretender" - or as we put it... an Al-Qaeda jihadist wearing a suit and now suddenly embraced by the West. He was only a few short years ago literally the personal emissary of ISIS emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Economist began its profile of the "great pretender" as follows:

One summer morning in 2021 a debonair-looking man approached the crossing point into rebel-held Syria. As he left Turkey behind, Khaled al-Ahmed felt his chest tighten. He was a member of the Alawite sect, a minority group from which the Assad dynasty, which had ruled Syria for 50 years, was drawn. Until 2018 he had been a close adviser to Bashar al-Assad, the country’s president. Now he was about to enter territory controlled by Sunni Islamist rebels, many of whom would have been happy to see people like him executed.

Guards waved him across into a no-man’s-land, where men in balaclavas were waiting in black SUVs to escort him to his destination. There was a cursory check of credentials. Then they sped past teeming refugee camps to a multi-storey concrete house on the outskirts of Idlib, a city which served as the headquarters for Syria’s most powerful Islamist militia. The group’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa – Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, as he called himself then – was expecting him.

Little was known about al-Sharaa in those days, but he did have a reputation for power games. He frequently kept visitors waiting – people assumed it was to underscore his own importance. But when the Alawite man entered his command centre, al-Sharaa walked straight up to him and kissed him three times on the cheeks – for al-Ahmed was an old childhood friend.

Thousand of innocent dead religious minorities later and...

Now he will be wined and dined, with red carpet and fawning media, in a European capital. But perhaps this was the plan and real plot all along. Assad has been overthrown and that's all the West cared about - certainly their concern was never actually about the Syrian people.