By Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib, Arab News

Many people adopt new year’s resolutions. They usually involve quitting smoking, losing weight, spending more time with family or just being more positive. However, for Bashar Assad, his resolution seems to be to rebrand himself as a man of peace.

President Putin has called Donald Trump following tonight’s scenes of unrest at the Capitol building in Washington DC, offering to send military advisors, along with ground troops and air force support to help restore stability and thwart a “destabilizing coup attempt” by insurgents led by Joseph Biden.

Iran’s regime has reportedly set up well-equipped hospitals for its forces and militias in Al Bukamal in eastern Deir Ezzor governorate, even as the already ravaged health services for the area’s long-suffering residents continue to collapse.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said on Monday that Russia's foreign partners in military and technical cooperation are paying increasing attention to Russian-made military products tested during Russia’s military operations on Syrian territory.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin stated that "there is an interest for many countries in obtaining Russian military equipment, which confirms its high reliability and effectiveness in real combat operations," according to what was quoted by the Russian media outlet ‘RT’.

A statement issued by the United Nations report on Tuesday cites Alena Douhan, the UN’s ‘special rapporteur on the negative impacts of unilateral coercive measures on human rights’, who expressed concern that the sanctions imposed on Bashar al-Assad’s regime under the Caesar Act “risk exacerbating the already dire humanitarian situation in Syria, especially in the course of COVID-19 pandemic, and put Syrians at even greater risk of rights violations.”

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has claimed that Qassem Soleimani, the late head of Iran’s Quds Force, was responsible for convincing Russia to intervene militarily in Syria.

Ten prominent free Syrian political figures have sent a letter to Dominic Raab, the United Kingdom’s First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, urging him to impose sanctions on the regime of Bashar al-Assad, just as the United States did with the “Caesar Act” to protect the civilian population in Syria.

The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) has quoted a number of families of Palestinian victims of torture killed in Assad regime prisons as stating that regime security personnel forced them to sign forged reports and death certificates issued by the infamous Tishreen Military Hospital claiming that their family members had died as a result of a ‘heart attack’.

Media in Deir Ezzor province have reported that Iran’s so-called ‘Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) has been disposing of unidentified bodies in unmarked graves near the village of Al-Suwayyah, with the report stating that numerous bodies have been secretly buried in this way in the desert areas in the province.

The Assad regime has submitted an official complaint to the United Nations Security Council over a visit in October by a delegation of American officials, headed by the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (‘Rojava’), insisting that this is a “violation of sovereignty”, although it’s not the first such visit by American and other Western delegations to the area, which is under the control of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).