A Country That Was Once Syria and the Agony of Its People

(Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)  "More humanitarian access is needed,. Intensified cross-line and cross-border deliveries are essential to reach everyone in need everywhere."

"If Bashar al-Assad wins or survives in ways that give him control over most of Syria, Iran will have a massive new degree of influence over Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in a polarized Middle East divided between Sunni and Shi'ite and steadily driving minorities into exile."

Anthony Cordesman, (2013) military and national security analyst, Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

"Bashar was never going to accept anything short of a total restoration of the 'wall of terror' built by this father in the 1970s and 1980s."

"No peace negotiations or reconciliation processes will ever change this reality, which has been built on fear and enforced with sectarian weapons."

Mustafa Khalifa, Syrian intellectual

 

"I would never (forget). When I left Syria, I had one of those rubber bands that you wear on your wrist. I had the Syrian flag on my hand. I swore that I will never take it off until I actually get my Canadian citizenship."

"Every day I look at it, it reminds me of what I've been through and what I've become right now."

"The big misconception is people calling it war. I guess it's war now, but it wasn't war when it started. It was a revolution against the dictatorship regime."

Mohammad Al Masalma, owner Mosy Photography, Syrian refugee, Halifax

A father reacts in 2013 after the death of two of his children, whom activists said were killed by shelling from forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, at alAnsari area in Aleppo.

Syrian Sunnis felt they had good reason to mount protests against their status as citizens of Syria ruled by a Shi'ite Alawite minority regime that ignored the human rights of the majority Sunni population. Their president felt they had no right to protest anything. He called them terrorists. He warned the world community that if the protests which turned into armed rebellion after the Syrian military arrested, tortured and murdered children and adults alike for presuming to protest their living conditions and human rights, would impact the entire Middle East. 

 

What started as a peaceful protest became a searing, no-holds-barred civil war.

Sectarian hatred, tribalism, ethnic loyalties have always divided the Middle East. In Syria those divisions became a symbol of just how gruesome atrocities can become as commonplace instances of rancor and rage as the conflict began to attract the attention of seasoned Islamist jihadists from other dangerous conflicts like Libya arriving in Syria to further season the simmering pot of lethal antipathies. Syrian Sunnis whether or not they became part of the rebellion, became victims in a war of attrition, targeted by their president as connivers with the rebels intent on bringing down the regime.

It took no time at all before terrified Sunnis were forced to vacate their homes, their farms, their businesses, and towns seeking to escape being strafed and bombed by military aircraft. Hospitals, clinics, schools, apartment buildings were being indiscriminately bombed as long as they were in Sunni-majority areas. Heritage UNESCO areas of ancient antiquity weren't spared. Soon a new scourge entered the ravaged areas calling itself a new caliphate and threatening Christians, Yazidis and Kurds with death as infidels. 

 

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's publicized atrocities horrified the world.

 

A doctor talks with refugees at a displaced persons camp in Atme in Syria's northwestern Idlib province near the border with Turkey, March 14, 2020

 

But it was the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad that was responsible for slaughtering a half-million of its own citizens, of creating six million displaced Syrians living in squalid camps within Syria, and another six million swelling refugee camps in Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon. Europe and North America became the destination of Syrian refugees hoping to secure a future for their families. It has been a decade since the first demonstration turned into an uprising on March 15, 2011.

Then the Assad regime began to put down a rebellion of 'terrorists', turning to barrel bombs for greater effect in bombing innocent civilians and rebel groups alike. This has been as much Iran's war as it has been Syria's. Assad wants his authority reestablished throughout the country that was once Syria, and Iran plans to be the power behind the throne, as its rightful destiny. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights counts 560,000 dead, while the Syrian Network for Human Rights places that figure 100,000 greater taking account of the Syrians brought to Assad's dungeons and never seen again.

 

Syrian amputee in refugee camp, with his children  (Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters)

 

With Tehran and Moscow at  his side, Bashar al-Assad prevailed. The Peshmerga in Kurdistan made it their mission to destroy ISIL's power base and threat to defenceless communities, even as Turkey as the neighbour sheltering more Syrians than any other, violates the Syrian border with the intention of rooting out a Kurdish presence in collaboration with the anti-Turkey Turkish Kurdish PKK. The awkward collaboration between Moscow and Ankara in defiance of a U.S. presence failed to relieve the agony of Syrians.

 

Syrian farmer, walks with his grandchildren, at an internally displaced camp in northern Idlib, Syria on March 11, 2021. (Reuters)

Any censuring initiatives arising in the United Nations is foiled by Russia which has gained a deep-water seaport and an airbase in Syria for its invaluable assistance in bombing Syrian Sunnis. The U.S. under the Obama administration challenged Assad to avoid using proscribed weapons against his people, that would be a 'red line' that could never be tolerated. The sarin gas attack in 2013 in Ghouta killed up to 1,729 Syrians of all ages. A trifling inconvenience that required no response from the U.S.

With that level of assent-by-unresponsiveness, there was nothing that would stop Assad from continued use of poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction and he now has over 300 chemical attacks under his belt, along with Russian protection of his regime. But of course the Obama administration could do little because to intervene in Syria would mean encountering the Russian air-defence system at Assad's disposal. Except the Russian anti-aircraft batteries appear to be unused, along with the Chinese low-altitude radar system.

The reality appears to be that only Israel has committed to deterring the best-laid plans of the Islamic Republic of Iran in its takeover of Syria and placement of Hezbollah at Syria's ostensible disposal. The Israeli Air Force carries out myriad bombing attacks on Hezbollah targets in Syria. The Israeli Air Force is well on its way to destroying a good proportion of Syria's air defences. And still maintains diplomatic relations with Moscow. 

 

The mass butcher of his own civilians remains beyond accountability for the atrocities he has committed against his country and its people. Aided and abetted by Russia and by Iran there appears no appetite from within the international community to demand justice for those who lost their human rights along with their disposable lives.

 

An explosion is seen following Russian airstrikes on the village of al-Bara in the southern part of Syria's northwestern Idlib province, March 5, 2020.   AFP