Grim anniversary as Syrian war turns seven
Some 12,000 Syrian civilians streamed out of Eastern Ghouta along “humanitarian” corridors yesterday, as rebel defences crumbled under the twin onslaughts of bombing and starvation. On the seventh anniversary of the uprising that evolved into the war that has torn Syria to shreds, a doctor still in the enclave texted that more than 5,000 people were at risk of annihilation, adding: “Please get our voice out to the world. This might be the last message I’m able to send.”
The last of the messages from inside the besieged Eastern Ghouta neighbourhood of Hammouriyeh came in the dead of the night on Wednesday.
“More than 5,000 people are at risk of annihilation,” a doctor wrote in a breathless text message. “Please get our voice out to the world. This might be the last message I’m able to send.
“The wounded are in the streets and the planes are targeting anything that moves,” he said. “The regime forces came from the east side. I tried to escape but I couldn’t.
“I witnessed an entire family getting killed by an air strike in front of me. I’m by a basement now trying to send this to you.”
The connection in the town went down shortly afterward, and by yesterday morning, rebel-held Hammouriyeh had fallen. The fate of the doctor, who gave his name only as Ismail, and that of others in the basement, is unknown.
The neighbourhood’s residents have borne the brunt of the government offensive on Eastern Ghouta in the past few days, with a relentless onslaught of barrel bombs, mortars and chemical strikes intended to leave them with little option but surrender. Some 12,000 civilians streamed out of the enclave along “humanitarian” corridors yesterday, as rebel defences crumbled under the twin onslaughts of bombing and starvation.
State television showed weary men, women and children carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes walking towards government-held Damascus, where a line of buses was waiting.
Those interviewed on camera praised the Syrian army and President Bashar al-assad and said armed groups had humiliated them and held them against their will. It’s impossible to judge their sincerity, but any comment suggesting the contrary would likely have seen them arrested, or worse, shortly after.
Others in Hammouriyeh decided to instead flee further into rebel territory in neighbouring areas, fearful of arrest by government forces should they be caught.
It is an irony not lost on the opposition that this major defeat – one that will likely mark the turning point in the battle for the much-prized enclave – came on the revolution’s seventh anniversary.
Their peaceful demonstrations that sparked the civil war in 2011 ended in the most violent way imaginable yesterday. The Daily Telegraph asked Syrians from both sides of the conflict how many more grim anniversaries they thought their country would mark. The shortest answer given was three.
“And what will be left by the end?” Jawad Abu Hatab, prime minister of the opposition Syrian interim government, asked. “Absolutely nothing. The tragedy just repeats and repeats on an endless loop and each time we lose a bit more of our humanity.”
The scenes playing out in Eastern Ghouta yesterday could just as easily have been from eastern Aleppo that brutally cold winter it fell to the government in 2016 following an almost equally long and brutal siege. Or from the Damascus suburb of Daraya, or indeed the central city of Homs before that.
In each case, residents were expelled and bussed to areas less strategic to the government. And in
‘I witnessed a family getting killed by an air strike in front of me’ ‘The tragedy repeats and each time we lose a bit more of our humanity’
each case, the international community said never again.
Never again has become never mind.
The doctor may have got his message out to the world, but is anyone even listening?
The West had counted on the Syrian war winding down, but it has only been ratcheting up. Each year has been more deadly than the last.
The UK voted not to militarily intervene against Assad in 2013, after a sarin gas attack that killed more than 1,000 in the same besieged enclave now under assault.
An ugly chain of events followed. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) formed and spread across Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
The jihadists raped and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, terrorised millions under its control and killed anyone that stood in the way of its prophesied caliphate.
Assad only grew stronger as the world united in a coalition against Isil, which it deemed the greater and more immediate of the evils, and his patron Russia became emboldened.
Moscow, a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council, has dismissed just about every resolution attempting to hold the dictator to account.
And in the absence of any real consequences, other state actors have begun moving pieces on the Syrian chessboard.
In January Turkey launched its own offensive against Kurdish forces along its border, where some 700,000 Syrian civilians are now besieged.
Israel has taken to regularly carrying out bombing raids on hostile Iranian and Lebanese Shia militia Hizbollah positions near Damascus.
The UN’S toothlessness has forced the US, the UK and France to quietly plot their own potential move against the government, but it is unclear what would trigger the trilateral action or what it would look like.
In the meantime, they pin their hopes on Russia pushing the regime towards a political solution and back to stalling Un-sponsored peace talks in Geneva.
But even Western diplomats quietly concede that the outcome is unlikely, given what little leverage they have left.
With so many foreign powers trying to carve their bit out of Syria, many of its citizens are left wondering what will even be left for them.
“The thing that’s new is that, for most of the Syrians living outside, there’s no more hope for return,” said Dima Wannous, the Syrian novelist, who left Damascus in 2011 and now lives in London.
“Syria has been swallowed up. You feel you no longer have a place; you no longer have a country.”