Mr. Speaker, I rise to condemn in the strongest
possible terms the ongoing, unrelenting attacks against civilians in
Syria committed by the barbaric, lawless regime of Bashir al-Assad,
with Russian backing. We have all heard the statistics over and over again like a broken
record: as many as half a million people killed since the armed
conflict began in March 2011, tens of thousands of them civilians; tens
of thousands more detained, disappeared, and perhaps, or even likely,
dead, directly at the hands of the regime; more than 11 million people
displaced once and again, inside and outside of Syria's borders, the
largest single refugee crisis the world has seen since 1945. More than
half of those displaced are children and youth. Last summer, much was made of the cease-fire agreement that the Trump
administration reached with the Russian Government to establish
``deescalation zones'' to stabilize Syria, while keeping the Assad
regime in power.