Mr. Robin Yassin-Kassab:

Usually I just speak, but I had to write this out as a presentation so I will read it. I hope it is not too stilted.

Liberated Aleppo is falling. The suburbs of Damascus are falling, or have already fallen, and are being cleansed of their recalcitrant population. The families of foreign militiamen are moving into these areas that have been cleansed. Silence is returning to a devastated and demographically changed Syria. This presentation is therefore more a lament for the defeated Syrian revolution, and for our failure to help it, than a policy recommendation. However, there are recommendations at the end.

Here is a summary of what I think has happened. From spring 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring, millions from all backgrounds protested peacefully against torture, crony capitalism, corruption and poverty, and for freedom, dignity and social justice. They called for the unity of all sects and ethnicities.

The Assad regime responded with extreme repression, shooting protestors dead, torturing many, including children, to death, and prosecuting a mass rape campaign. By summer 2012 it had provoked an armed uprising of military defectors and civilian volunteers grouped under the umbrella term "Free Syrian Army". Of course, the Free Syrian Army was never one thing. It comprises about 1,000 militias under this umbrella. They are all widely different. Most of them are locally based and so on.

The regime deliberately started a war because it knew a serious reform process would end in its demise. It calculated, correctly, that in a war situation it could count on strong foreign allies, unlike its opponents. It was following the blueprint laid out by Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez. In the late 1970s he had met a widely based challenge, including communists, leftists, liberals, democrats, nationalists as well as Islamists, with severe repression. This provoked a desperate armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1982. The regime responded by razing the city centre, killing tens of thousands. The memory of this destruction kept Syrians silent for the next three decades. This is the model for what is happening now. They have done it before and it has worked before.

Once it had started a war, the regime deliberately sectarianised the war, for divide-and-rule purposes, and actively encouraged the rise of Sunni jihadism to present itself internationally as the lesser evil. The notion that we have on the one hand a secular regime and on the other mad jihadists is wrong in all kinds of ways. The way in which it is most wrong is that it fails to recognise how the regime itself has been working very deliberately and very hard to build a jihadist opposition.

In 2011, while the regime was detaining and torturing tens of thousands of non-violent protestors, it released 1,500 Salafi jihadists from its prisons. These are the people it had helped to go to Iraq to fight the American occupation and, more to the point, to fight the Shia population during the American occupation of Iraq. When these people came back to Syria, they were all put in prison and kept there until the regime needed them again in 2011. These people include Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, Zahran Alloush, the founder of Jaysh al-Islam, and Hassan Abboud, the founder of Ahrar al-Sham, as well as many senior people in ISIS-Daesh. These people were in prison in 2011 and were then released.

In 2012, the regime organised a string of sectarian massacres on the plain between Homs and Hama where Sunnis and Alawis live side by side. In each, the army shelled a rebellious Sunni village, then irregular Alawi young men moved in to cut the throats of women and children. The aim - it was successful - was to stir an anti-Alawi backlash among the Sunni majority, which in turn would scare Alawis into loyalty to the regime. Out of fear rather than conviction, most but not all Alawi have remained loyal. Assad and a large majority of his security chiefs are from the Alawi minority.

The regime practised a scorched earth policy on the areas it could not control, burning the civilian infrastructure and driving millions out. This provided the vacuum in which transnational jihadist groups could thrive.

The Assad regime has old links with Daesh-ISIS, having helped set up its previous incarnation, the Islamic State, in Iraq. For more than a year after it set up in Raqqa, Daesh and Assad did not fight each other. Even today, when the Free Syrian Army is fighting Daesh, the regime bombs the Free Syrian Army. An arsonist dressed up as a fireman, Assad has used Daesh, an enemy of the Syrian revolution, to present himself as the "lesser evil" although he is responsible for far more killing. Russia used Daesh as an excuse for its bombing, but over 80% of Russian bombs have fallen on the revolutionary areas, not on Daesh territory.

Even in these conditions, the Syrian revolution survived. Still today half of rebel fighters fall under the loose Free Syrian Army umbrella.

This means they are non-ideological in the sense that they are fighting only to defend their communities, to bring down the regime and to allow the people to decide what comes next. In other words, they are not fighting to impose a particular vision of, for example, an Islamic state on the people.

The revolution is represented by civilians more than by its fighting man, and this is what one hardly ever hears about in the media. At the heart of what is happening in Syria is what civilians are doing. It is the civilians who started the revolution; the fighters came afterwards in response to Assad's repression.

In areas liberated of Assad and Daesh, Syrians have set up hundreds of local and provincial councils, half of which are directly elected by the men and women of the area and the other half of which are quasi-democratic, practising various forms of internal and community voting and consensus. Let us not hear anything about the Arabs needing a strong man because they are not capable of doing democracy as in the most difficult of circumstances, when they are under attack by everybody, they are actually practising democracy.

Women's centres, educational health projects and independent trade unions have been established. In a country once called a kingdom of silence, there are more than 60 free newspapers and dozens of free radio and television stations. This is what is being destroyed today. East Aleppo now has the largest concentration of civil society organisations, democratic councils and everything from educational projects to theatre groups, and these people are being slaughtered as we speak.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey provided arms to some sections of the opposition, but in an inefficient, disorganised and insufficient manner, and for the wrong reasons. For example, the Saudis and the Qataris are primarily concerned with their geopolitical conflict with Iran rather than the good of the Syrian people.

Far from this being a western regime change plot, as many here choose to believe, President Obama's most significant act was to veto the Qataris, Saudis and Turks from delivering the defensive anti-aircraft weapons the opposition so desperately needed. I have never called for weapons to be given to the opposition so it could invade Assad's home village or his palace in Damascus. The people need anti-aircraft weapons not to conquer new areas but to defend themselves from the scorched earth policy. President Obama vetoed that.

President Obama prioritised his deal lifting sanctions on Iran in return for nuclear compliance and implicitly recognised what he called Iranian assets in Syria. After the 2013 sarin gas attack, President Obama's red line vanished and the US took to treating Syria as an extension of the so-called war on terror which, of course, vastly increased the appeal of terrorist groups in the Middle East. Donald Trump seems set to continue on this course, but probably with less rhetoric and dressing.

Iran and Russia have intervened on a massive scale. Some 80% of the pro-Assad ground troops attacking liberated Aleppo are foreign Shia jihadists, organised and commanded by Iran. They come from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Assad controlled less than a fifth of the national territory before Russia's savage imperialist assault. Assad's army has not won a battle by itself for years. By now, its most effective units answer to local warlords rather than a central hierarchy. Again, the idea of stabilising the country by giving it back to the central Syrian state is an absurdity, because there is no central Syrian state left.

In the west in general we failed to understand the revolution, offer solidarity or even see through propaganda. It is quite shameful that earlier today propagandists from the regime sat where I am now. It has been noted in the Arab and Muslim worlds and will not be forgotten. It is one thing to invite a group of civilians who are pro-Assad, are worried about the revolution and think that it is the best idea to stick with Assad to appear before the committee. Those people need to be heard and talked to. However, having the representative of a genocide speaking here when the genocide is at its height, a man who has called for an army of suicide bombers to hit Europe and a man who has repeatedly called for the civilians in Aleppo to be murdered because they are all terrorists is shocking. I have gone off course, but those comments were shocking and have been noted.

In the west we failed to offer solidarity or even to see through propaganda. The right saw the revolution and counter-revolution in outmoded security terms, and so did much of the left, wasting time with conspiracy theories, Orientalist myths about eternal sectarian conflicts and the rest of it, and inaccurate common territories on proxy war chests such as this being a re-run of Iraq. It is ridiculous. We will live with the consequences of this. Walter Benjamin wrote that behind every fascism is a failed revolution. New forms of fascism are rising in the east and west, including here in Europe, as a result of our collective failure.

What should Ireland's Government do? In many ways, it is now far too late to do anything. It should not be inviting propagandists for genocide to speak to it. Civilian protection should be an urgent and immediate priority. At least 500,000 people have been killed in Syria, over 90% at the hands of the regime and its backers. The figure of 94% comes from the Syrian network for human rights, which is considered to be very reliable because it does not write down only the name of the person killed, but also details including the place, date and so on, and all of the information is verified. Some 94% of civilian, not military, casualties were caused by the Assad regime and its backers.

This is the lesser evil. Some 12 million people, or more than half of the population, have been displaced. Humanitarian assistance is absolutely essential but insufficient. Ireland should call strongly for a ceasefire, safe zones, prisoner releases - hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared into the Assad gulag - and for sieges to end. Currently, 1 million people are under starvation siege in Syria. As much diplomatic and economic pressure as possible should be brought to bear on Russia and Iran to deter their assaults. Russia should, for instance, be excluded from the SWIFT banking system for its repeated war crimes, employing incendiary and cluster bombs and bunker busters on civilian areas and targeting schools, hospitals and aid convoys, including the United Nations aid convoy.

Iran's Shia occupation forces in Sunni majority Syria are one direct cause of the rise of Sunni jihadism. Ireland had a sectarian problem that was linked to imperialism. It can surely understand that if one uses Catholics to police Protestants and Protestants to police Catholics, and then brings foreign Protestants to police Catholics, one may well have an angry Catholic backlash. It is human nature. Shia forces are not just policing people; they are murdering them.

Irish investment in Iran which, I hear, is speeding up, should be suspended until Iran removes these forces from Syria. This is in the interests of the security of Europe. If one does not care about people in Syria, surely one should care about people in Europe. Giving Sunni jihadists and identity groups an excuse for their narrative is not a good idea from a European point of view.

War criminals should be prosecuted. Even if it is not happening today, people believe that eventually war criminals should be prosecuted. Maybe that would deter them a little.

Ireland should settle many more refugees and work with other states to address the plight of permanently exiled refugees. We have a problem, in that the mood in the west in general, and in Europe in particular, is dramatically anti-refugee and anti-immigrant. People are scared of refugees, in particular those from the Arab and Muslim world. However, if we are now looking at an Assad or Iranian and Russian victory in Syria this means that millions of people will never return. That is the reality with which we have to start dealing.

For example, most of the city of Homs, which was conquered and pacified by the regime in 2012, is still entirely depopulated and its residents are in camps in Lebanon and Turkey. That is a model for the future of Syria because these people know that if they return their sons will be arrested and tortured, their houses will never be rebuilt and so on.

In the medium term, Ireland needs to work out how to deal with what is, in effect, a foreign occupation in Syria. The armed rebellion will continue as a long-term moral insurgency. I do not know what will happen, but it is possible now that the revolution has been driven out of the cities we can discuss the end of the revolution. There will no longer be democratic councils, newspapers and so on. It may well be the case that Syria will be increasingly dominated by jihadists.

Groups such as Nusra and Hara al-Sham will increasingly dominate the insurgency, as it will become. The war is not ending. The revolution, it looks like, is now in its last days. This will, in Syria, be framed as a national liberation struggle.

Ireland and others will have to be prepared for the jihadism and sectarian conflict unleashed by the tragedy. Symbolically, Syria is an immensely important part of the Muslim world and of the Arab world and the fact that it is occupied by foreign Shia jihadists and Russian imperialists is a development which will have major ramifications in the coming decades. Jihadists will be immeasurably strengthened by the defeat of the revolution in the urban areas, to the same extent that democratic revolutionaries will be weakened. This moment – the fall of Syria's Sunni-majority cities to Russian bombers and an international Shia alliance, facilitated by the West – will mark a new stage in the development of jihadism.