Mr. Farouq Al Habib:

As an individual, I am happy to accept any compromise that stops the killing in Syria. Will accepting Assad, even for a transitional period, help to stop the killing in Syria? I believe it will not help anyway because there are already tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of armed men in Syria, and every one of them has a personal revenge to exact on the Assad family. Assad became a symbol of killing. I know, of course, that the leaders in the security departments in the middle levels might be more responsible for killing as they gave orders on a daily basis and tortured detainees. Most of them are not known to the public and their names are not known. Assad is a symbol now and as long as this symbol is in Damascus, nobody could convince thousands of armed men to lay down their arms, stop the fight and respect the transition. Nobody would believe in it.

We have an example from when Ali Abdullah Saleh stayed in Yemen after what they called the transition. He was able to blow everything and destroy the process because these family governments ruling the Middle East control the security departments that control the state. Our states in the Middle East are not controlled by the Ministers that one sees in meetings. In Syria, we know from experience that a security officer is much more influential than a Minister responsible for defence or the interior. Those security officers are linked to the family that has ruled Syria for 50 years. As long as they are there, they will be able to destroy the transitional process.

We receive support from the US, the UK and other governments, but what kind is it? As rescue workers, we receive support to retrieve the dead and injured from under rubble after an attack, but we ask for help in stopping these attacks. Before I go on a trip to attend a meeting, I ask my colleagues what kind of assistance we must seek to be able to conduct more operations. They tell me they do not want to conduct more operations; rather, they want to stop. Stopping the killing will not come with this type of assistance.

The Americans are not successful in interventions. We have our experience in the Middle East. There is already intervention in Syria and boots on the ground from Iran, jihadis and, recently, Russia.

While the free world stays silent and says it is against intervention, other countries which support dictatorship and are against human rights interfere anyway. As the UK foreign minister declared three days ago, 85% of the Russian attacks until now targeted areas that are not controlled by ISIS. What will be the end of this? What will happen if the free world does not intervene and the others intervene and target the moderate opposition? This crisis will not end if our friends leave us alone. It will explode and continue to spill over. The refugee crisis and extremism in Syria are symptoms of the original disease, which is dictatorship, atrocities and a lack of political hope. As long as Syrian civilians do not have a safe place in Syria and civil society does not create an environment in which to build an alternative, extremism and the refugee crisis will continue.