In the heat of the Syrian summer in 2018, presidential candidate Catherine Connolly, alongside TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O’Sullivan, stood amid the rebar and flattened concrete of Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp with a number of camouflage-clad guards led by a man in civilian clothes.
They had embarked on what Connolly has since described as a ”fact-finding trip” to Syria’s 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.
The group, initially founded as a social organisation, was “one of the first militias to form”
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