President Trump is receiving both criticism and praise from liberals and conservatives for his bold actions in response to the chemical attacks on Syrians by President Assad. But what about the Syrian residents? How Syrians feel about Trump’s actions against the brutal Syrian leader?

Donald Trump has written explosive tweets, Russian diplomats have issued stark military warnings, and European leaders have urged caution. But as the row over the use of chemical weapons in Syria escalates, one set of voices risks being drowned out: that of ordinary Syrians themselves.

 For Kassem Eid, a 32-year-old who was until 2013 a resident of Moadhamiyeh, a suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, the next step is simple. A victim of the chemical weapons the Syrian army has deployed on the country’s civilians, Eid says: “I think (the West) should kill Assad.”
 As with the 2017 Khan Sheikhoun incident where at least 74 people were killed by a nerve agent, the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concluded the Syrian regime was likely responsible for the 2013 attack witnessed by Eid.
 Like many of the Syrian residents, refugees and exiles HuffPost UK spoke to, Eid supports military intervention that would remove Assad and allow space for Syrians themselves to take part in free and fair elections.
Children walk along a damaged street filled with debris in the Damascus suburb of Zamalka October 3, 2013. Survivors of the sarin gas attack east of Damascus six weeks ago still suffer from insomnia, severe headaches and the mental fog that they say began after their exposure to the gas. Everyone around Zamalka speaks of a night of horror that they liken to Armageddon. Locals say they have become accustomed to army shelling whenever they congregate, a practice they say is done on purpose in order to target the largest number of civilians. – REUTERS
 The town he grew up in was besieged by President Bashar al-Assad’s army in June of 2012, and the remaining 10,000 or so civilians sheltering there were “reduced to eating trash and the leaves from trees,” Eid recalls.

By the end of the summer, the military situation in Syria was precarious for the regime. Opposition forces were at the outskirts of the capital and many of Assad’s supporters, who hold a majority of the powerful positions in the military, had left the city to focus their defensive efforts elsewhere.

In the early hours of 21 August 2013, the residential areas of Moadhamiyeh was bombed with sarin, a deadly nerve agent banned under international law.

“I’ve seen a lot of f*cked up shit in my life. I’ve seen Assad bomb children into pieces, I’ve seen women being raped, I’ve seen men getting butchered and burned alive, all this shit but I will say that the look on that little boy’s face during the chemical attack…” Eid told HuffPost UK.

“There was a boy who was choking. I was trying to save him, and while I looked at his face he was choking and his eyes were glassy and this foam was coming out of his mouth… It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Eid now lives in the US – he was lucky enough to be able to escape Syria through Lebanon. He now lives in the United States and is publishing a book titled My Country: A Syrian Memoir.

But he feels deeply affected by the news of the latest chemical attack, launched on the town of Douma last weekend. –Huffington Post

Last year, Syrian chemical attack survivor Kassem Eid sent shockwaves through the anti-Trump, anti-refugee ban community when he refused to play along with CNN’s anti-Trump narrative during an interview with #VeryFakeNewsCNN host Brooke Baldwin. The interview  took a seriously bad turn for the anti-Trump network when they thought they were going to be interviewing a 2013 Syrian chemical attack survivor who would assist them in their pro-refugee propaganda campaign against President Trump.

Kassem Eid, didn’t waste any time with small talk with Baldwin, but instead, cut directly to his praise for Donald Trump’s bold actions against President Bashar al-Assad’. After almost 60 seconds of praising Donald Trump for his actions, CNN pundit Brooke Baldwin broke in to remind viewers that Trump also didn’t want Syrian refugees coming to America, by showing a clip of Hillary Clinton trashing Trump on his travel ban. Eid shot back, “With all due respect, with all due respect, I didn’t see each and every person who was demonstrating after the travel ban, I didn’t see you three days ago when people were gassed to death, when civilians were gassed to death. I didn’t see you raising your voice against President Obama’s inaction in Syria, that let us refugees, that made us refugees get kicked out of Syria. If you really care about refugees, if you really care about helping us, please, help us stay in our country. We don’t want to come to the United States. We want to stay in our country. This is hypocrisy…We don’t want to become refugees. Help us to establish safe zones.”

After Baldwin couldn’t bear anymore compliments for Donald Trump, she interrupted, “ok, I understand”.

Eid persisted, “And if you just give me a few seconds, just to tell President Trump: ‘Please sir, what you did was amazing. What you did was a powerful message of hope for a lot of people inside and outside of Syria. Please, don’t stop on this. Help Syrians stay in their country…”

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