Rayhan Ahmed Topader :
“This war is being decided on the battlefield not by negotiations: our priority now should be helping civilians”
Why has the international community failed to protect Syria’s civilians? Syria have heightened attention to the humanitarian crisis in the country. But why have civilians in Syria not been protected by the international community? There is no hope, none at all,” Abu Umar, a resident of the embattled city of Aleppo, asked these question Middle East Eye earlier. Between the atrocities of the Assad regime and Islamic State (IS), after almost five years of a devastating war and a never ending flow of images of destruction and human tragedy coming out of Syria, the nation’s people continue to suffer. The tragedy of the Syrian Civil War is one that began with civilians who first staged peaceful demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, before a brutal crack down sparked an even more brutal war though amid all the fighting today, there is a story seldom told. A new study by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research found that 470,000 people have been either directly or indirectly killed by the war, significantly more than the 250,000 dead, the UN quoted before it stopped counting casualties 18 months ago.
The report estimates that 11.5% of Syria’s population has been killed or injured since March 2011. The massive majority of the death toll in Syria are civilians,” Haid of the Syrian NGO Badael tells The World Weekly. “The majority of air strikes are targeting civilians and facilities such as schools, hospitals, bakeries and markets. Even in besieged areas, where 1 million people have no access to basic needs, according to Siege Watch, the majority are civilians.
Russian and Syrian aircraft are pounding the rebel enclave of East Aleppo, which is besieged and isolated from the outside world. Some 250,000 to 275,000 civilians and 8,000 fighters are trapped there, with every likelihood that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces will go on attacking until they win or the rebels leave. Hospitals and care centres are being systematically destroyed. UN aid convoys are being denied access by government forces. It is a moment to consider what can be done to stop the suffering and save those who have not already been killed or maimed by the rain of shells and bombs.
The emergency debate on Aleppo in the House of Commons last week did not provide many feasible ideas on how to do this but then such solutions are hard to find and may not exist. Other than as an expression of rage, talk of imposing a no-fly zone in which Russian and Syrian planes would be shot down is a silly diversion, since the US, Britain and their allies are not going to go to war against Russia or its Syrian ally.
The absence of a British policy was underlined by Boris Johnson’s call for demonstrations outside the Russian embassy” as a protest against the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo by Russian aircraft. But overall his approach was cautious and he distanced himself from calls for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria, saying: “We cannot commit to a no-fly zone unless we are prepared to confront and perhaps shoot down planes or helicopters that violate that zone.We need to think very carefully about the consequences.”
News over the last few weeks of deaths by starvation in Madaya, once a popular resort town near the Syrian-Lebanese border now besieged by pro-government forces, and towns that have suffered a similar fate, has rekindled international attention to the humanitarian catastrophe that Syria is facing. An international aid conference in London received pledges of over $10 billion. “Never has the international community raised so much money on a single day for a single crisis,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the end of the daylong conference in early February.
Despite this promised funding, and while many humanitarian actors are doing their utmost to provide aid, the colossal number of casualties demonstrates just how complete the failure to protect civilians has been. Tens of thousands of Syrians have fled fighting around Aleppo towards the Turkish border crossing Fatih “The main obstacle in securing civilian protection has been the lack of political will from the international community, Yasmine Nahlawi of the UK-based NGO Rethink Rebuild Society tells The World Weekly. She adds that the problem is not “a lack of legal instruments”, pointing to a host of UN Security Council resolutions which ban the use of barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and starvation as weapons of war. Instead, she says: The problem lies in implementing these resolutions, and what we find time and time again is that words are not being backed by action.
“Denouncing russia as a pariah or calling for more sanctions does nothing to help bring the conflict under control”
“Ms. Wijninckx of the Siege Watch project concurs, saying that the division in the UN Security Council is the main obstacle. “The key world actors disagree on what should and can be done. We’ve got a Security Council member (Russia) bombing civilian neighbourhoods in support of the Assad regime,” she tells The World Weekly.
The protrac ted war in Syria has meant that humanitarian operations in certain areas are often not possible at all, or, only, under immense risk. Just this week, air strikes targeted four different hospitals in northern Syria. The new MSF report said 63 facilities supported by the medical charity in Syria were hit in 2015, having been targeted by 94 aerial and shelling attacks. Mr.Haid of Badael sees another issue as being responsible for the lack of civilian protection.
“The most important problem was the absence of mechanisms to name the perpetrators committing crimes against civilians and hold them accountable for the atrocities they have committed,” he says. The perpetrators in Syria,”after testing the waters”, knew that no one was willing to stop them. Mr. Haid mainly sees the Syrian regime as responsible, pointing out that it escalated the kind of weaponry it used. They started with light arms, then they moved to tanks, and then artillery and airplanes, and then chemical weapons.?The truth is that there is no panacea for ending the war in Syria.
The intensity of the violence is too great. There are too many players with divergent interests inside and outside the country to agree to a general ceasefire. This was demonstrated by the failure of the week-long ceasefire negotiated by Russia and the US in September, in what was the most serious attempt to agree a truce in five years of fighting. In the event, it turned out that the Syrian government believes it is winning the war and does not want to stop it.
The armed opposition is dominated by Islamic State and Fatah al-Sham, formerly the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria known as the al-Nusra Front, neither of which were included in the ceasefire and had no reason to abide by it.?It may be that, as super-powers, the US and Russia are not as super as they used to be, in the sense that neither side was able to force its allies to give full support for the ceasefire. It is not clear how far either Moscow or Washington really tried hard to do so.
There was always mystery over the real attitude to the ceasefire of Iran, which leads a powerful axis of Shia states and movements in the shape of Iraq and Hezbollah of Lebanon. The Shia in all these countries see the war in Syria as a struggle in which their very existence is at stake and which they have every intention of winning.
If there is going to be another ceasefire in Syria, then Russia and Iran will have to be part of it because they are such important participants in the conflict. Denouncing Russia as a pariah or calling for more sanctions against it may give rhetorical satisfaction to some, but it does nothing to help bring the conflict under control or mitigate the suffering of civilians. The most immediate priority should be how to save the people of East Aleppo. The UN says half of them want to leave.
The UN Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has bravely offered to accompany them out of the city and suggested they relocate to the rebel-held Idlib province. But there are serious difficulties in arranging this because people in East Aleppo either do not want to go to Idlib or to deliver themselves to the mercies of the Syrian secret police. The extreme Islamists such as Fatah al-Sham do not want to give up East Aleppo tamely.
To do so would be to admit that the great Syrian rebellion has failed. Assad is increasing his control of Damascus, where he is eliminating rebel enclaves. If he captures all of Aleppo he will be unassailable, something which may be true already.
The teacher, quite a young woman, was neatly dressed in a long coat and skirt, with her hair covered by a plain, tightly wrapped white scarf. She doesn’t want me to identify her because it could lead to trouble. She works at a school in Qaboun, a suburb of Damascus that is controlled by a rebel faction loyal to the Free Syrian Army.
I managed to cross from government-controlled Damascus to meet them last summer. Their commanders were bearded, pious Muslims who said they condemned the brutality of the jihadists.They said they were prepared to die to destroy President Bashar al-Assad and his regime, and wanted to build a state modelled on 21st Century Turkey, under a government with a distinct Islamist flavour. Playground deaths. I could see the teacher was working hard to keep her voice steady as she described what happened when two bombs hit her school last week during morning break. The 15 who died and the others who were horribly injured were all boys because it was their turn to go out to play in the warm autumn sun.
The teacher, a devout Muslim, was saying the prayer for those who are about to die as the smoke cleared and she saw the boys she had sent out for their break lying dead, dying or injured near the school entrance. After the first explosion, far enough away not to hurt them, they had been running to get inside as they had been taught. Innocent civilians are frequently caught in the crossfire around the Syrian capital. She had sent two 11-year-olds out of the class earlier that morning for being disruptive. They could not read or write because they had missed four years of school.
They lay dead on the playground together, and later that day were buried side by side. The teacher told me she still hadn’t cried, although sometimes she shakes with cold.” What have the children done to deserve this?” she said, in a voice that was never raised, but always full of anger.
“They don’t have weapons. The rebels will not want to see themselves driven from their last urban strongholds and confined to the country side. They have always had an incentive to keep civilians with them as human shields. In some IS-held areas a five-storey apartment block may have three floors where families live, and two of which are occupied by fighters. Inability to distinguish civilians from fighters leads to massive destruction.
The Russian and Syrian air forces may be destroying East Aleppo but in Iraq the US-led air coalition largely demolished the city of Ramadi, which had been held by IS. The care taken to avoid civilian casualties may differ from air force to air force, but in general their tactics are similar. The next few months will tell if this is going to happen in Mosul, the one large city that is still held by IS.It may be that the evacuation of East Aleppo under the auspices of the UN would be seen as handing a victory to Assad.
But he is probably going to win there anyway. This is the current trend in the war, with Assad tightening his grip on Damascus, Homs and Aleppo, and becoming more confident by the day. These advances could be reversed by one or more outside powers upping their support for the opposition by supplying them with arms, ammunition and money, but this does not seem to be happening. For now the outcome for the war is being decided on the battlefield and not by diplomacy.
