{"id":127399,"date":"2025-10-17T06:04:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T06:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127399\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T06:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T06:04:08","slug":"catherine-connolly-pictured-with-man-linked-to-war-crimes-in-syria-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127399\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine Connolly pictured with man linked to war crimes in Syria \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Presidential<\/a> candidate Catherine Connolly<\/a> has been accused of making \u201cmisleading\u201d statements about meeting \u201cPalestinians\u201d in Syria<\/a> after photographs emerged of her in the company of a militia leader linked to war crimes against Palestinian refugees.<\/p>\n

Ms Connolly is pictured with other members of an Irish delegation in the company of Saed Abd Al-Aal, who led a pro-Assad<\/a> armed group responsible for killing and starvation in a refugee camp in Yarmouk, a southern district of the Syrian capital Damascus.<\/p>\n

Her June 2018 visit, with former MEPs Mick Wallace<\/a> and Clare Daly<\/a> and then TD Maureen O\u2019Sullivan, took place just a month after Syrian government forces and its militia seized the camp.<\/p>\n

Describing Saed Abd Al-Aal as \u201ca war criminal\u201d, Abu Yasser (50), a Palestinian resident in Yarmouk, this week said \u201chis group helped the former regime to kill the Palestinian people\u201d.<\/p>\n

At the time of Ms Connolly\u2019s visit to Yarmouk \u201cthere was no possibility to meet normal Palestinians\u201d, he said. \u201cBasically everyone fled in the face of that final regime offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Questioned on RT\u00c9\u2019s<\/a> Morning Ireland last month about her visit to the camp, Ms Connolly said: \u201cWe were shown around by Palestinians, we had conversations with them. We exchanged the little gifts we had and I came back with an absolute horror of war, of the Assad regime, which I had before I went there, and generally speaking that we need to use our voice for peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Irish Syria Solidarity Movement (ISSM) said it was misleading for Ms Connolly to state she had met Palestinians in Syria given, it said, she could only have met those supportive of the Assad regime.<\/p>\n

\"CatherineCatherine Connolly and fellow TDs in Syria in 2018 <\/p>\n

Saed Abd Al-Aal was named in 2018 as the commander of the military wing of the Free Palestine Movement (FPM), an armed group that backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad during that country\u2019s civil war.<\/p>\n

Many Palestinians living in Yarmouk, along with Syrian residents, joined protests against the Assad regime. The FPM was involved in a three-and-a-half-year siege of the camp, which led to starvation and disease, as well as the killing of Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk.<\/p>\n

In 2023, a Berlin court sentenced Mouaffaq Dawa, a Palestinian-Syrian refugee who became known as \u201cThe Butcher of Yarmouk\u201d, to life imprisonment with hard labour for crimes committed during the Syrian civil war.<\/p>\n

Dawa, a member of the FPM, fired a grenade at a group of Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk, killing at least seven people.<\/p>\n

Last July a court in Germany charged four former members of the FPM, who had fled to the country during the war, with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder of civilians.<\/p>\n

Germany says it has the right to try these cases through its universal jurisdiction for war crimes.<\/p>\n

In an open letter, the ISSM took issue with Ms Connolly\u2019s claim last month that she was \u201cshown around by Palestinians\u201d at Yarmouk, given the FPM \u201chad been instrumental in imposing the years-long starvation and siege of the camp\u201d.<\/p>\n

The group further criticised Ms Connolly for failing to mention,that \u201cyour guide was none other than Saed Abd Al-Aal, commander of the \u2018Butcher of Yarmouk\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response, Ms Connolly said she was not aware of the presence of Saed Abd Al-Aal in Yarmouk. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was in a fact-finding mission. It was life-changing for me,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

\u201cObviously I have no control in a country controlled by a dictator as to who might be there or not there, but I\u2019m on the record for utterly condemning the Assad regime.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no control who came in and out of our company. That doesn\u2019t mean I support any of these people. Quite the opposite actually, and it is now 2025 and I\u2019m standing in a presidential election.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said it was \u201cnot accurate\u201d to state she only met Palestinian refugees who were pro-Assad.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Catherine Connolly spent \u20ac3,700 from taxpayer-funded allowance on \u2018Syria\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI met people who were absolutely desolate, who were refugees in Syria\u201d and who highlighted to the delegation \u201cthe history of refugees\u201d from Palestine, she said.<\/p>\n

The London-based human rights group Action Group For Palestinians of Syria confirmed the man in the picture with the Irish delegation was Saed Abd Al-Aal.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is one of the most feared shabiha [unofficial militia supporting the Assad regime] who have been fighting tirelessly alongside regime forces for years,\u201d the group said in an email to The Irish Times. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was accused of committing numerous murders and of being responsible for the siege of Yarmouk camp and preventing the entry of any food supplies into the camp throughout its duration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ISSM criticism of Ms Connolly follows previous controversy surrounding her meeting with Fares Al-Shehabi, another pro-Assad figure. He had given her and the three other TDs accompanying Ms Connolly a tour of part of Aleppo on their 2018 visit to Syria. <\/p>\n

Asked last month whether she regretted meeting Al-Shehabi, Ms Connolly said: \u201cCertainly in retrospect, when one looks back and sees the comments that he made and you see them, absolutely, this man is utterly unacceptable to me.\u201d However, she said the trip itself \u201cempowered me, enabled me and made me stronger as a voice for peace\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Presidential candidate Catherine Connolly has been accused of making \u201cmisleading\u201d statements about meeting \u201cPalestinians\u201d in Syria after photographs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[27169,9,10,1921,27170,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,24699,5,72,59,1181,15516,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-127399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-bashar-al-assad","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-catherine-connolly","12":"tag-clare-daly","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-featured-news","15":"tag-featurednews","16":"tag-headlines","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-mick-wallace","24":"tag-news","25":"tag-palestine","26":"tag-presidential-election","27":"tag-rte","28":"tag-syria","29":"tag-top-stories","30":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}