There’s more than one evil in Syria
Beyond the refugee crisis, a no-fly zone now may be the best hope of protecting children.
Somewhere beyond the reach of your conscience, thousands of tiny Syrian boys and girls every bit as innocent as Alan Kurdi are never coming to Canada, no matter who wins the election.
They won’t come to Canada because you can’t be a refugee until you leave. And these children haven’t managed to do that — they’re still part of the millions of civilians trapped within the bloody centrifuge that is Syria.
For those younger than 5, war is all they’ve ever known.
They won’t come to Canada, ever. Because like Alan, they will die. And the overwhelming evidence suggests it will be the indiscriminate weapons of Syrian President Bashar Assad — including illegal barrel bombs dropped on residential areas by regime helicopters — that kill them.
No serious analyst of the Syrian civil war believes otherwise. The latest damning indictment of Assad’s killing machine came this week in a new report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), which said the regime was responsible for 82 per cent of the 2,236 children killed between Jan.1 and Aug. 31, 2015.
That’s 1,883 Syrian kids so far this year, compared with 104 killed by the Islamic State and 58 killed by the international coalition at war with ISIS.
The UN Security Council, in closeddoor testimony earlier this summer, was presented with new documentation showing that while all parties to the conflict are killing civilians, the use of barrel bombs by Assad’s forces now is responsible for the vast majority.
French UN Ambassador François Delattre emerged from the session telling reporters, “This primitive, crude, cheap method of war is by nature indiscriminate. And it is inhumane.”
It is horrific to imagine what Alan Kurdi endured in his final minutes, as he began to swallow water instead of air.
It is beyond horrific to ponder what the 1,883 Alan Kurdis killed this year alone endured after Assad’s barrel bombs fell.
Some of their little hearts would have kept beating for hours beneath the rubble, if not days.
But Canadians, whose own hearts came to life over refugee policy after seeing images of a boy on a beach, owe it to all these Alans to ponder the other end of Canadian policy. Stephen Harper’s argument — “Fighting ISIS is key . . . simply changing refugee policy isn’t enough,” he said Friday — belies the fact that Islamic State is nowhere near the biggest killer in Syria. Set aside the question of whether Canadian bombs are likely to hinder or help the Islamic State’s quest for medieval triumph, and what you have is a policy that does nothing to halt Assad’s grim aerial harvest of Alan Kurdis.
Thomas Mulcair, by contrast, ap- peared on Friday to seize the other end of the Islamic State-or-nothing argument, saying Canadian Forces have no role whatsoever to play in Syria and Iraq.
Good options for Syria began drying up four years ago, when the entire world — everyone — played bystander.
Those of us who once reported regularly from the country now see our former colleagues, actual Syrian journalists in Damascus, lashing out as never before.
One such reporter, the BBC’s Lina Sinjab, took to Facebook Thursday, saving her harshest wrath for rich Gulf Arabs who ship luxury cars to London each summer, burning through piles of cash high enough to help refugees by the thousands.
“We were brought up to say we are Arabs (first), then Syrians,” Sinjab wrote. “Now I am ashamed of being an Arab and only proud to be Syrian.”
But as the blame storm widens and Canadians fixate on refugee numbers, reaction elsewhere is beginning to look beyond an Islamic-State-ornothing approach to Syria — including the possibility that, in the face of a seemingly unstoppable civil war, global anger now will galvanize around the impositions of safe havens and a no-fly zone within Syria proper.
The Times of London on Thursday tabled that option, arguing that tak- ing more Syrian refugees, though necessary, “is a fraction of the battle.” In the absence of peace, the paper said, “enforcing safe areas and no-fly zones should not be beyond the power of the rest of the world.”
That analysis was echoed in he Guardian, which said the spiking refugee numbers describe “a collapse of hope among millions of Syrians . . . that their home will be safe again in their lifetime.
“To begin restoring that hope will inevitably mean international intervention of some kind. The establishment of credible safe havens and the implementation of a no-fly zone must be on the table for serious consideration.”