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.

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.

In an interview with Iran’s state Al-Alam channel, former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emphasized what he called the pivotal role of the late Iranian Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, in the Syrian crisis, praising the killing and destruction of the Syrian people and their cities by the latter.

The Syrian regime's army in Deir Ezzor governorate is trying to compensate for its human losses after long battles its forces have fought against the Syrian opposition factions in various Syrian cities, in addition to recent attacks on its army forces blamed on Daesh (ISIS), by imposing forced recruitment on young men in the area.

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’.

Syrian tycoon and former senior Assad regime official Firas Tlass has reported claims from regime insiders of tensions between Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asmaa, which the insiders say are difficult to “patch up.”

Tlass, the son of former Assad regime defence minister Mustafa Tlass, who now lives in exile in Europe, asked in a post on Facebook: “Will the Russians intervene to control things? I don’t know".

The Assad regime's security forces arrested nine young men from the western countryside of Damascus, while they were trying to flee towards Lebanese territory to escape compulsory service with the regime army.

According to SY24’s correspondent in Damascus, “The arrests took place last Thursday and Friday, when the regime’s operatives stationed at a checkpoint in the Rankous area in the Damascus countryside arrested six young men on Thursday and three on Friday, with their names being shown [on a searchlist] as all having failed to perform their mandatory service.”

One of Bashar al-Assad’s personal bodyguards has reportedly claimed refugee status in Germany, despite being involved in perpetrating heinous crimes against Syrian dissidents, even arresting and handing over members of his own family to Assad's forces to be punished for their participation in anti-regime demonstrations.