On Saturday 16th June, over 400 Muslim women and children from across the UK gathered outside the Syrian embassy to express their outrage and disgust at the Houla and Al-Qubayr massacres and continuing slaughter of innocent civilians in Syria by the Assad regime. The demonstration was organized by the women of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain and was aimed at conveying the solidarity of Muslim women and children of Britain with the struggle of the Muslims of Syria to remove their oppressive ruler and system and replace it with Islamic rule. Part of the protest was led by the voices of children who delivered heartfelt messages calling Muslims of the UK and across the globe to speak out against the atrocities of the Syrian government and to call for an Islamic leadership that would sincerely look after the needs of the children of Syria and the Muslim world.
Speakers on the day included Dr. Nazreen Nawaz, Women’s Media Representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain and Ibtihal Bsis, lawyer and also member of the party. They exposed the horrific extent of the brutality of the Assad regime waged against its people, including daily massacres, subjecting women and girls to brutal rapes in front of their families, and torture of children that included beatings, burnings, electric shocks, sexual violence, and execution.
They also stated that the struggle of the people was not simply to remove Assad but to replace his corrupt secular political system with an Islamic system. In addition, they rejected calls for UN intervention in the Syrian crisis, highlighting the track-record of the UN in failing to protect the blood of Muslims in Bosnia, Palestine and Iraq and how current UN initiatives were simply being used by the Syrian regime to buy time to crush the opposition and kill protestors. Dr. Nawaz stated, “The UN has only ever existed as a tool to secure the foreign interests of Western governments. It is a graveyard to bury problems.” She also described the UN, Arab League, and Friends of Syria group as “‘talk-houses’ that issue empty statements while Syria bleeds.”
Speakers also rejected Western intervention in Syria, stressing that the current bloodbath was the heavy price that the Syrian people were paying for over 40 years of Western intervention and US support of the dictatorship in Syria, that began with the installing of Assad’s family in power 4 decades ago by the Americans. They stated that allowing intervention in the current crisis by Western powers would only result in placing their new ‘puppet’ in power, who would secure their interests at the expense of impoverishing and oppressing the people. They stressed that the martyrs of the uprising did not sacrifice their pure blood only for their brothers and sisters to be subjected to another cycle of fear and repression.
The call of the protest was rather for the armies of the Muslim world to be mobilized to stop the bloodshed, highlighting how the region has some of the largest armies in the world but that they were being restrained from protecting the Muslims of Syria by dictatorships who dance only to the tune of their Western masters and use their soldiers to fight their own people rather than defend the blood of Muslims. Protestors called for all these dictatorships to be removed and replaced with the guardianship of the Islamic Khilafah system that would establish a just political system, protect the blood of the Muslims, return the dignity of its women, put an end to the long-standing state of oppression that has crippled the region, and create real change for its people.
The event ended with a dua for the Muslims of Syria and by calling Muslim women of Britain to remember their duty towards their brothers and sisters in Syria by speaking out against the actions of the regime and calling for the establishment of the Khilafah that would liberate Syria and the whole of the Muslim world from its oppression.
