Peace in Syria a distant dream as civilian bloodshed continues
The area has not just been subjected to siege and bombing: since the beginning of the year it has been targeted in three suspected chlorine bomb attacks
IF YOU had the impression the war in Syria was winding down – perhaps because what is happening there no longer makes the headlines it once did – think again. Just this week scores of civilians were killed when air strikes carried out by the Assad regime and its Russian allies pummelled opposition-held areas in the north-western border province of Idlib and on the hinterland of the capital, Damascus.
That came as the UN warned that the scale of suffering across the country had reached unprecedented levels, with three major population hubs cut off from aid; increasing displacement and more than 13 million people in need of assistance nationwide. This week the UN called for a one-month ceasefire to address what it described as an “extreme situation” that “we haven’t seen before” at any point during the conflict, which will soon mark its eighth year.
Eight years of bloodshed and horror – with a death toll that now exceeds 500,000 – sieges, starvation and the displacement of more than 11 million Syrians, a great many of them now refugees in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan as well as farther afield in Europe.
Days after the UN called for a ceasefire this week, Moscow, without whose support Assad would not have been able to make the gains he has in the last couple of years, dismissed the idea as unrealistic.
With no political solution to Syria’s crisis in sight, it appears the Assad regime is determined to push forward for military victory no matter the cost.
The UN’s assistant secretary general and regional humanitarian co-ordinator for Syria, Panos Moumtzis, has drawn attention to what he called a “dramatic deterioration in the humanitarian situation” since late last year with access to civilians in rebel-held areas blocked by the regime. One of those areas under bombardment this week – where more than 80 were reported killed in air strikes – is East Ghouta, a long-standing opposition stronghold on the outskirts of Damascus which has been subjected to a punishing siege. According to the UN, some 400,000 people – around half of them children – have had no fresh supplies of food or medicine since late November. Unicef says 12pc of children under five years of age in East Ghouta are suffering from acute malnutrition.
The area has not just been subjected to siege and bombing: since the beginning of the year, it has been targeted in at least three suspected chlorine bomb attacks, which UN investigators say they are examining. East Ghouta is also where a sarin attack killed 1,400 people – among them 400 children – in 2013, prompting a Moscow-Washington deal to dismantle the Assad regime’s chemical weapons arsenal.
THE other opposition enclave battered by airstrikes this week is Idlib, a key node for rebel forces from early on in the uprising against Assad. Now it is home to more than two million people, around half of whom have been displaced from other parts of Syria as the regime wore down its opponents with the aid of Russian airstrikes and ground forces that include Iranian troops and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Apart from the Idlib offensive by the Assad regime, Turkey has recently attacked a Kurdishcontrolled border area, putting civilians at risk.
While the Assad regime has from the outset sought to portray all opposition forces as jihadists, the trajectory of the war since peaceful anti-regime protests in 2011 later tipped into an armed uprising which jihadist groups, including Isil, subsequently infiltrated, shows a patchwork of overlapping conflicts complicated by an array of external actors backing various factions.
The international dimension of the Syrian conflict threatens to go in further unpredictable directions following Turkey’s incursion last month around the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Some 100km east is the town of Manbij, where the US maintains a military presence after helping Kurdish forces drive Isil from the region in 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged Washington to withdraw its troops from Manbij and renewed a threat to expand Ankara’s military offensive to the town.
Far from winding down, Syria’s war looks like it might yet get even more complicated.