{"id":127511,"date":"2025-10-17T07:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T07:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127511\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T07:16:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T07:16:08","slug":"who-is-the-pro-assad-militia-leader-catherine-connolly-was-pictured-with-in-syria-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127511\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is the pro-Assad militia leader Catherine Connolly was pictured with in Syria? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the heat of the Syrian<\/a> summer in 2018, presidential<\/a> candidate Catherine Connolly<\/a>, alongside TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O\u2019Sullivan, stood amid the rebar and flattened concrete of Syria\u2019s largest Palestinian refugee camp with a number of camouflage-clad guards led by a man in civilian clothes. <\/p>\n

They had embarked on what Connolly has since described as a \u201dfact-finding trip\u201d to Syria\u2019s Yarmouk camp. The man they met was Saed Abd Al-Aal, the commander of the Free Palestine Movement (FPM), a pro-Assad militia that fought against the opposition during the years-long siege of the camp. <\/p>\n

The group, initially founded as a social organisation, was \u201cone of the first militias to form\u201d in the face of anti-regime protests in the camp in 2011, says Nidal Betari, a Syrian-Palestinian writer from Yarmouk, and former neighbour of Al-Aal.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Its leadership] had longstanding links to the regime before the civil war,\u201d he says. \u201cThe transformation was a way to further ingratiate themselves with Assad, likely to benefit [the leadership\u2019s] business interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to Al-Aal with an unpublishable expletive, he says coyly, \u201clet\u2019s just say, we\u2019ve all heard many stories about him\u201d.<\/p>\n

Al-Aal\u2019s reputation certainly precedes him in Yarmouk, a southern district of Syria\u2019s capital, Damascus, and largely populated by Palestinian refugees. Everyone knows his name, but few have a good word to say. The FPM has been linked to a number of human rights violations, most notoriously what the residents of the camp refer to as \u201cthe aid massacre\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Yarmouk\u2019s Rijeh Square, I stopped Moaz (24), to ask him whether this was where the massacre happened. \u201cNo, the massacre that happened here was a daesh [Islamic State] car bombing in 2019,\u201d he says. \u201cThe aid massacre was just over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had only been 12 at the time and doesn\u2019t remember the day itself. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was war every day; there were many killings like this,\u201d he says with a shrug.<\/p>\n

\"Yarmouk,Yarmouk, Syria. Photograph: Cian Ward <\/p>\n

In 2014, as a group of hungry men and women crowded round a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid station, Mowaffaq Dawa watched from a rooftop, angry over the death of his nephew two days earlier. <\/p>\n

Seeking revenge, Dawa fired an RPG into the crowd, killing seven, for which he earned the grisly moniker, \u201cThe Butcher of Yarmouk\u201d. A decade later he would be arrested<\/a> in Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killings.<\/p>\n

Court files state that he was \u201caffiliated with the FPM\u201d, although some in the camp claim that he belonged to a different militia at the time of the attack and only joined the FPM later.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would consider [Saed] a war criminal,\u201d says Abu Yasser (50), a Palestinian resident and self-professed autodidact on the camp\u2019s history. \u201cHis group helped the former regime to kill the Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

Only a few weeks prior to Connolly\u2019s visit, Al-Aal\u2019s militia had aided the now-toppled regime to wrestle control of Yarmouk camp back from a motley association of rebel factions – one of which was the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

By 2018, with the camp shattered by years of barrel-bombings and siege, Connolly was photographed<\/a> with Al-Aal in front of a pancaked building. Yarmouk remains eerily unchanged seven years later, a broken city, home only to rubble and skeletal homes.<\/p>\n

Anti-Assad sentiment is prominent in Yarmouk and its residents dismissed the idea that any minded tour could offer an accurate picture. <\/b>In the summer of 2018, \u201cthere was no possibility to meet normal Palestinians,\u201d says Abu Yasser, \u201cbasically everyone fled in the face of that final regime offensive\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Yarmouk,Yarmouk, Syria. Photograph: Cian Ward <\/p>\n

According to UNRWA – the body responsible for managing Palestinian refugees – as few as 40-50<\/a> residents may have remained following the regime\u2019s takeover. \u201cIf I had met her, and she was accompanied by someone like Saed, I would have been too scared to speak honestly.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the few who remained throughout was Qassem (45). \u201cMy brother starved to death under their siege in 2014,\u201d he casually says. \u201cEveryone went hungry in those days.\u201d Amnesty International found<\/a> at least 128 cases of death by starvation in 2014.<\/p>\n

Qassem is originally from Gaza; nine of his siblings are still there. \u201cThey are living through a siege, there is hunger and bombings just like here,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat happened in this camp is being repeated in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone who opposes what is happening now [in Gaza] must also oppose the actions of Assad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cian Ward is a freelance journalist based in Damascus, Syria, who covers conflict, politics and humanitarian issues<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the heat of the Syrian summer in 2018, presidential candidate Catherine Connolly, alongside TDs Clare Daly, Mick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[27169,9,10,1921,27170,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,24699,5,59,15516,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-127511","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-presidential-election","26":"tag-syria","27":"tag-top-stories","28":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127511","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=127511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127511\/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=127511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}