U.S. strike fuels hope, uncertainty on ground

Some Syrians doubt Trump will help end their suffering

— Six years of war in Syria have ravaged the life of Ebrahim Abbas, 27.

Abbas, a computer technician, was detained for protesting against the Syrian government, besieged in his hometown, shot in the stomach and watched his brother die in a shelling attack. He escaped, but his father, a diabetic, died later from a lack of medicine, and his mother was killed by a sniper.

It was from his refuge in Turkey that Abbas heard about President Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base to punish President Bashar Assad for a chemical weapons attack. It felt good.

“Watching a world power taking revenge for civilians against the Syrian regime gave me a surge of hope and made me a bit optimistic,” Abbas said.

But the attack will not bring back all that he has lost nor help him return home soon. In a measure of how entrenched the war is, the Syrian government conducted new airstrikes Saturday on the town targeted in the chemical-weapons attack, with at least one person killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The U.S. strike on the air base was the most direct, deliberate military intervention by the United States against Assad’s forces since the war began. Trump said he had launched the strike because he was moved by images of women and children choking on poison gas.

“That was a horrible, horrible thing,” he told reporters after the chemical attack. “And I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.”

But while the strike Thursday appeared intended to limit the chances of retaliation, Trump has offered no proposals to end the war or to assuage the vast human suffering it has generated, sending fleeing Syrians across the globe.

Yasmine Mashaan, a pharmacy technician from the town of Muhassan in eastern Syria who lost several brothers to the conflict, said the strike was unlikely to change much for her and her family. And she doubts Trump’s motivations.

“It would be great if he continued this in the direction of saving more civilians or establishing a safe zone, but after his racist speeches and anti-refugee policy, I think the strike is more for popularity,” said Mashaan, who is now in Germany after fleeing there with her family. “But judging by how fast he intervened in Syria and how powerful it was, then we might be going somewhere with it.”

The number affected by the conflict boggles the mind. What began as an uprising in 2011 escalated into a civil war as protesters took up arms to respond to the government’s repression and seek its ouster.

Over time, countries like the United States, Turkey and Saudi Arabia backed the rebels, while Russia and Iran helped Assad. As chaos spread, extremist groups gained ground. Al-Qaida infiltrated the rebel movement, while the jihadis of the Islamic State seized territory that extended into Iraq.

Now more than 400,000 people have been killed, a figure roughly equal to the population of Tulsa, Okla., or Oakland, Calif. Many more have been maimed.

Half of Syria’s prewar population of 22 million have fled their homes, a number close to the population of Belgium. Five million of those are registered refugees abroad, according to the United Nations. Most are in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, where 70 percent live on less than $3.84 a day, less than the cost of some lattes at Starbucks.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which does aid work in Syria, said he could not comment for or against the strike by the United States, but he said that “they do not solve any of my urgent priorities.”

For the humanitarian situation to improve, aid workers would need more border crossings for getting aid into the country, assurances that air and ground forces would not attack hospitals and better access to besieged and suffering communities, including nearly 400,000 people within an hour’s drive of Damascus, the capital.

“It is heartbreakingly frustrating to be a humanitarian worker and to have the resources and the supplies but not to be able to reach these people,” Egeland said.

Within the conflict’s statistics are countless stories of torture, detention, forced conscription, families torn apart and normal lives downgraded rapidly or simply cut short.

Even some Syrians who welcomed the strike questioned why, after all of the war’s brutality, it was the chemical attack this past week that had brought a show of force against Assad.

“Of course chemicals are weapons of mass destruction,” said a doctor east of Damascus who treated victims of the first major chemical attack in Syria, in 2013. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared government reprisal. “But what about sieges? What about killing children? Isn’t it wrong for children to grow up without knowing Tom and Jerry? Without knowing chocolate?”

President Barack Obama did not respond militarily to a chemical attack in 2013, despite having called the use of such weapons a “red line.” Since then, the doctor has watched the world move on while the siege of his area has tightened, he said through Skype. He said he had learned to live with less electricity, less fuel, less clean water and less food.

“We are living like ancient people, how they depended on themselves, how they used wood to make fires,” he said. “It is a hard life.”

He expected more from the United States and its allies after the 2013 attack, what he called “a position that was appropriate for the free world.” But the result was an agreement, brokered by Russia, for Assad to give up his chemical weapons.

“The solution to the crime was a deal to take away the weapon but leave the criminal,” the doctor said.

The strike by the United States made him mildly optimistic that Trump would intervene more forcefully than Obama had.

“Trump is a closed box that has started to open,” he said. “Soon we will see what’s inside.”