[This was in response to a blogger, who attacked Iran for supporting Assad and squarely blamed Iran for Syrias carnage. Since, the original blog was closed, I „imported“ my entry to Radioyaran]

Iran has remained a faithful ally to a regime that despite its undeniable deficiencies and crimes is still a far better choice than “rebels” who have excelled at faking video clips right from the beginning, kidnapping, besieging, torturing and killing all kinds of “non-aligned” civilians under the farcical charge that the victims have been “Shabeeha” and as such had deserved to die.
We are speaking of “freedom fighters” who ambushed and killed TV anchormen, actors, footballers, journalists, reporters, doctors, lawyers, clerics, teachers, factory workers and unarmed policemen due to their being “supportive” of the regime or otherwise not sharing the ideology and future plans of the “revolution”.
We have an allegedly peaceful and nonviolent opposition movement that was later exposed as armed rebellion which started as early as March, 2011.
We have moderate rebels who did not hesitate to praise their radical “brothers” and in fact lamented the latters being designated as terrorists despite them engaging in repeated acts of mass executions of soldiers, alleged pro-regime militias and even Sunni clan members in favor of the government.
We have members of the moderate factions such as Farooq brigade cutting out the heart of a dead soldier or – as reported by German Spiegel in March 2012 – proudly speaking of having executed (through decapitation) mostly “Shiite” captured soldiers.
The so called revolution, completely undeserving of such a romantic and deceptive label, is more and more relying on chechen, gulf arab or North african suicide bombers and Jihadists, of which definitely noone suffered from Assads jails.

Anybody sincerely interested in stopping “Assads crimes” and bringing peace and change to Syria, should first work towards a peace conference and not torpedo it by bringing ever more unrealistic preconditions. If the syrian opposition and their mostly foreign allies are so sure that Assad is totally hated by the broad majority, they should not be afraid of Assad being a candidate in free elections under UN supervision.
But this will never happen, because Assad is still much more popular then the Ahmad Jarbaas of this world.