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... It's fair to say our meetings with Assad, and the messages we later relayed to the world about what was taking place inside his country, couldn't have been more different.
Gabbard flew secretly to Syria in mid-January of that year" the first member of Congress to do so since 2011, when Syrian forces gunned down peaceful protestors and imprisoned thousands of others during the height of the Arab Spring. The ensuing conflict between anti-Assad forces and the Syrian military was unspeakably brutal " and became even more so in 2015 when Russia's Vladimir Putin dispatched special forces and aircraft to bombard pockets of "rebel" resistance in towns like Aleppo.
But Gabbard was unmoved by the indiscriminate Russian bombing or Assad's repeated use of chemical weapons against his own people. Her trip" privately funded by a Cleveland-based Arab American group sympathetic to Assad" turned into a propaganda coup for the Syrian regime. Gabbard had two meetings with Assad , revealing nothing (then or since) about what they actually said to each other.
These sessions with the dictator were, to say the least, controversial. "To say I'm disgusted would be an understatement," said Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger on the House floor. "By meeting with the mass murderer of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Tulsi Gabbard has legitimized his dictatorship and, in turn, legitimized his genocide against the Syrian people."
Gabbard, for her part, defended herself, writing in a blog post (and in a later CNN interview ) that she would be ready to meet with anyone "if there's a chance it can help bring about an end to this war." She later said Assad is "not the enemy of the United States."
But the real value to Assad from this trip is not what she said about him, but what she told the world about the Syrian conflict itself. She adopted wholesale the Syrian (and Russian) governments' line that the main forces resisting Assad were not the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups pledged to creating a democratic free Syria but Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists " supported no less by the United States government. (Never mind that the U.S. military was engaged at the time in targeting and destroying the ISIS caliphate next door in Iraq.)
"There is no difference between moderate' rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS"they are all the same," Gabbard wrote in her blog post. ...