The utter failure of the international community to protect civilians in Syria

A water collection point in Atmeh
refugee camp, Syria. Image: J.I.Wessels. All rights reserved.

On 14 June, thousands of panicking Syrian
civilians pushed themselves through a narrow fence opening at the northern
Syrian border crossing of Tel Abyad-Akcakale, fleeing the heavy fighting
between the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish YPG on one side and the Islamic State (IS
or Da’esh) on the other. The town of Tel Abyad is strategically located; it is the
closest border crossing to Raqqa, a rural city that is an IS/Da’esh stronghold
and self-appointed central city of the so-called Islamic State.

These Syrian civilians were wedged
between this and the Turkish border, which was initially kept tightly closed by
the Turkish authorities and IS/Da’esh. These people had absolutely nowhere to
go. After a while, IS/Da’esh jihadists arrived at the border fence to push the
Syrian refugees back to Tel Abyad. Knowing that it would mean death if
someone tried to flee the Islamic State, naturally people started to panic.

The Turkish award winning
photojournalist, Bulent Kilic, wrote a deeply impressive report on what happened afterwards and his
exceptional photographs show the deep fear and sheer desperation on the faces
of Syrians fleeing war and repression. Bulent said that in the four years he has
been photographing refugees on the Syria-Turkey border, he had never seen
anything like this.

The Tel Abyad border crossing is now
again under the control of the Syrian secular opposition. The Kurdish and Free Syrian
Army flags are both flying in the town. It is a small but significant victory
for those fighting IS/Da’esh and the Assad regime, but the end of the
Syrian war is nowhere near. Indeed, the Syrian refugee crisis is the largest of
our time and the international community keeps failing to protect Syrian
civilians.

The 7th of April this year was a
global day of solidarity with Syria. #PlanetSyria, an initiative
by a group of non-violent Syrian activists, gathered an outpouring of
solidarity messages from around the world. I added my bit by posting a clip from the footage that I recorded in 2014, during my
trip through Aleppo province, when I saw for myself the aftermath of the Assad
regime’s indiscriminate aerial bombardments on civilian areas.

The initiative #PlanetSyria aims to
gather support to create a no-fly zone and give Syrians a sense that they are not
alone. Nowadays, Syrian activists feel very much abandoned by the international
community, and that it has utterly failed to protect civilians in Syria. According to the United Nations, four
years into the Syrian uprising, at least 220,000 people have been killed, over
8 million made refugees and more than 14 million children directly affected. That is the situation today.

In 2012, I wrote in my blog that “Bab el Hara 2.0″, the famous Syrian
Ramadan soap series about the uprising against French colonialism, would be
made real, with real blood and real bodies, and the world has both watched this
happen and turned its back on the Syrians. With many others back then, I argued
for no-fly zone protection and many more UN observers than the lousy 300
unarmed observers that were sent on a charade of a mission.

None of that has happened. The
deadlock due to UNSC veto strategies protracted the conflict and the voids were
filled with jihadists from Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Libya, Iraq and
Europe—but also Syrian jihadists who happen to have been released by the Assad regime
from Saidnaya prison in 2011. Jihadists have kidnapped many civil society
activists, like peace activist Father Paolo Dall’Oglio and human
rights defender Razan Zeitounah, founder of
the Syrian Violations Documentation
Center (VDC), which monitors human rights abuses.

I watch the Syrian war unfold almost
daily; I have a growing group of Syrian friends arriving now here in Sweden; I
communicate with friends in Syria from Aleppo, Damascus, Raqqa, friends who
live either under the control of the FSA, the Kurds, IS/Da’esh or the Assad
regime. Last year, I went back to Aleppo province, a place where I had spent
five years of my life as an anthropologist. I saw that Syrians maintain their strength
and warmth, but the people and country are deeply traumatised and broken.

I visited Atmeh refugee camp and there I realised this humanitarian
disaster has become worse than Darfur. It hurt to leave Syria again and realise
there is no end in sight for them. We have shipped hundreds of kilos of clothes
and fluffy toys from Sweden to Syrian refugees over the past years, and have
helped several Syrians to come to Sweden. I get weekly WhatsApp messages, Viber and
Skype updates from friends inside Syria about barrel bombs, kidnappings, air
raids, shellings, water and electricity cuts. The war has almost become “normal” for them…and for me. Friendships
have been strained or broken. Families are divided. It is utterly unsettling.
But I will not lose hope that someday, it will become better.

Assad still in his seat

The Assad regime is still in place
and the international community has failed to protect Syrian civilians. The FSA
controls parts of Syria, Kurdish areas are under attack, IS/Da’esh jihadists and
extremist groups like Jabhat al Nusra have filled the voids to Assad’s
advantage, controlling around one-third of the country. Assad uses them to
justify the regime’s mass-murder campaigns in other parts of Syria. Yes, these jihadists
are brutal murderers and should be fought, but the biggest perpetrator of
murder and war crimes inside Syria however is still the Assad regime.

This is illustrated by Syria
Campaign’s infographic comparing
numbers of civilians killed by rebels, ISIS, and the regime, which was a reply
to Bashar al-Assad’s brazen reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris,
saying, “we are against the killing of innocent people everywhere”. If any of
these war criminals in Syria ever arrive at the ICC, this is going to be the
trial of the century.

The UN in New York recently opened
an exhibition of graphic pictures
taken by a defected mystery officer called “Caesar”. These atrocities still
happen in the dark dungeons of Assad, in dungeons that IS/Da’esh jihadists took
over from the regime. The human suffering they both inflict on Syrian
civilians is the same; brutal violence, torture and mass murder.

The air raids stop when Assad wants them
to stop; until then he has crossed the red lines and received the green light
to do whatever he wants to keep his seat and kill the Syrian people—as long as
it’s not with the chemical weapons that were originally meant for Israel. The
chemical weapons deal with the Assad regime has now emerged and has the
support of the United States, Russia and unsurprisingly, Israel, according to the book Ally by Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren.

“Bashar or we will burn the country”
has been Assad supporters’ slogan from the beginning of the Syrian uprising. Critics
say that the opposition failed to win over urban businessmen and engage them in
the Syrian uprising. Winning over the merchants of Aleppo would have been nice,
but early on, Assad made sure that the merchants in Damascus and Aleppo were
in fear of losing their business. Then, he accused Turkey of
instigating the violence and of moving factories from Aleppo to Turkey.

Some politicians and critics say
Iran should be involved in a political solution. But with its active participation
in the atrocities in Syria, with boots on the ground and with a general
like Qassem Suleymani in charge of their military interventions in Syria and Iraq, there is no realistic option for Iran
to play a stabilising role —it has already proven to have a destabilising
role.

The Syrian war will not stop as long
as Assad is in power; moreover, if Assad goes, Abu Bakr Baghdadi would fade
away, being unable to sell oil and sustain ISIS. Both the Assad regime and IS/Da’esh
have been in a rather strange, mutually beneficial financial relationship, with the latter selling
oil to the Assad regime and making black market deals. But as long as the UNSC board
is still split and veto rights are being used to further the strategic
interests of the world’s most powerful weapon-dealing countries, people will have to choose between “Pax
Putin” or “Pax Obama”.

Likewise, we cannot expect any
sizeable assistance or constructive diplomacy from dictatorial Gulf countries. To
show their commitment to and solidarity with the Syrian people, wealthy Gulf
states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have taken none of the four million Syrian refugees since 2011. It
is utterly shameful that these warmongering countries together with Iran have
no empathy whatsoever towards Syrians, and that the rest of the world watches these
countries destroy the region with their proxy wars in Iraq, Syria or Yemen.

Atmeh refugee camp, Syria. Image: J.I.
Wessels. All rights reserved.

To reiterate: the only
hope for Syrians is for European countries to take a strong political stand and
demand an immediate no-fly zone over the country so civilians can finally have
some sense of peace and security. However, with the American-led international
coalition regularly bombing IS/Da’esh areas inside Syria, this is not on the
horizon.

This means that the
Assad regime can continue bombing opposition areas with countless civilian
casualties. And with the latest nuclear deal between Iran
and the P5+1 countries (United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom
and Germany), there will be no strong political will to actively protect Syrian
civilians by calling for an immediate no-fly zone.

Syria is Iran’s
playground now. If sanctions are completely lifted, Iran’s nuclear deal opens
up the country to the global energy markets, with crude oil being responsible
for 72 percent of its total
export, and US and European companies lining up to make some good oil and
gas deals with Iran. In 2013, Iran's oil minister wanted companies such as Shell,
Statoil, Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips to develop its oil and gas field. There
is no reason for this wish not to be fulfilled if the sanctions are lifted
completely.

With Iran satisfied to be
‘back in business’, and IS/Da’esh as an ideal common enemy in the global war on
terror, uniting the US and Iran gains priority over protecting Syrian
civilians from Assad’s war. Hence a no-fly zone would not be of major concern
for the US.

The US would prefer to
continue the coalition bombings in seeming coordination with the Assad regime. Funding to the Syrian opposition and transitional government in
Turkey has also been cut over the past months. The fact that US-backed Saudi-Arabian bombing
campaigns in Yemen has created tensions between Iran and the US, it does not seem to
have any effect on their bombing campaigns in Syria.

Bombing campaigns seem to
be the trend in the Middle East, whether it is Israel bombing Gaza, Saudi-Arabia
bombing Yemen or Assad dropping barrel bombs, which he conveniently denies
having in his latest television interview with CBS News.
First he states that his government is not killing civilians: "This is not
realistic and this is against our interests as a government to kill the
people. What do we get? What is the benefit of killing people?" Later in
the interview he denies having barrel bombs but does admit to having bombs: "No,
no. There’s no such a thing called barrel bombs. We have bombs. And any bomb is
about killing". Spot the paradox.

All bombing campaigns, whether by the
Syrian regime, Israel, Saudi-Arabia, Iran, the US or Islamic jihadists
create civilian casualties. It is quite simple: bombing the hell out of people
does not bring peace. It oppresses, brings fear, the silence of death, grief
and destruction. How difficult is that to understand?

Syria is not a dichotomy

Critics say the opposition has not yet
offered a proper alternative to the Assad regime. Indeed the opposition is
fragmented but Syrian revolutionaries, activists, intellectuals, filmmakers and
scholars in Syria are still active and are building institutions in the
liberated areas where there is no Assad regime and no IS/Da’esh. The FSA together
with the Kurdish YPG are fighting both IS/Da’esh and the Assad regime. The
military successes this Syrian coalition had in Afrin and Aleppo province, and
the latest capture of Tel Abyad, prove they can defeat IS/Da’esh together very
effectively on the ground.

Revolutions are rarely orderly,
otherwise they would not be revolutions; they need a major paradigm shift and
those naturally come with chaos. Syria is not a dichotomy with either Jabhat al
Nusra or IS/Da’esh on one side and the Assad regime on the other. Both are
oppressors and the Assadists are the worst—that is a fact.

It is far too simplistic and
absolutely unfair to equate the secular and diverse opposition with JN/Da’esh
or Sunni sectarianism and then call the opposition genocidal with a binary
approach that only works to Assad’s advantage. There is a third way that is
constantly overlooked: to quote Desmond Tutu, “if you are neutral in situations
of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressors”.

There are many Syrian opposition members
and groups who have distanced themselves completely from jihadi brutality and
any kind of sectarian kidnappings and killings. The question is, who is going to
convince the likes of Assad, jihadi extremists, IS/Da’esh, Hassan Nasrallah,
Qassem Suleimani that the gun will not solve this? The regime has made
perfectly clear that it will not accept being entangled in a transition of
power. It certainly will not be willing to be steered away from the Baath.

IS/Da’esh is entrenching itself day-by-day,
brainwashing Syrian children. Religious messianism is the most challenging
security threat to the wider Middle East, in the form of a self-fullfilling
prophecy that sustains a perpetual state of war. As Hezbollah, ISIS/Da’esh and
the Assad regime regularly justify their war crimes and brutal violence as a
fight against US imperialism and Zionism, I fail to see how their acts of
killing, and bombing, the slaughtering of Syrian and Palestinian civilians
inside Syria on an industrial scale, will help them reach these objectives.

Assad’s killing dungeons

In my current postdoc research at
Copenhagen University, I work with non-violent Syrian video activists from
Aleppo and Raqqa and I also to investigate how video can help in collecting
evidence that could be used in future tribunals against war crimes. The 55,000 pictures brought to the
US by ‘Caesar’ are an incredibly rich body of evidence.

In the pictures that are now under investigation in
the US, they find Syrians from all backgrounds, including Alawite, Armenians,
Christians, Palestinians. The Assad regime is not selective in who it kills—anyone
who is against the regime and does not support Assad. I suspect minorities got
the harshest treatment.

Most of the torture techniques used
by the Assad regime are the brainchild of the notorious Nazi, Alois Brunner, who died in
Syria. Alois Brunner lived an undisturbed life under the wings of Assad, using
the pseudonym Georg Fischer. European fascists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis
adore Assad.

Because of the on-going atrocities
in Assad’s dark dungeons, his barrel bombs, his responsibility for the majority
of killings, for the current humanitarian situation in Syria, because he nurtured
jihadists in his jails and contributed to the rise of Da’esh and now sustains
their income by buying oil from them, it is important we do not keep quiet and
let him off the hook.

Global solidarity with Syrians

At the end of
March this year there was a surge in global solidarity with Syrians, when ISIS
terrorists took over the Yarmouk
Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, but the misery of Yarmouk was not
something new. There have been 2875 documented Palestinian deaths in Syria since
2011, the Assad regime is denying entry to aid workers, attacking Yarmouk with
regular aerial bombardments. People are fleeing, and the violence and starvation
caused by the Syrian Army’s long-term siege has shrunk the population from the 150,000
Palestinians that lived in Yarmouk before 2011 to 20,000 over the last three
years.

These
Palestinians have been trapped for three years, starved and bombed; yet only
now when ISIS attacks Yarmouk people suddenly begin to express “solidarity”
with them. Where were these “concerned” people before? It now emerges that the
Assad regime practically led the hundreds of IS/Da’esh fighters through the
holes in the siege maze to enter Yarmouk, as Lina Khatib claims in her latest op-ed. The 20,000
remaining residents of Yarmouk are still utterly trapped between Assad forces
and IS/Da’esh jihadists, beheadings have already been carried out, and dozens
of barrel bombs have been dropped on the camp. Yarmouk needs a corridor now and
Syria an immediate countrywide no-fly zone.

The most recent developments on the
Tel Abyad-Akcakale border remind us again of the utter entrapment of Syrian
civilians, the overwhelming humanitarian disaster in Syria and the need for
global solidarity and immediate direct action to stop the violence and install
a no-fly zone.

Occasionally, there is a glimpse of
some kind of global solidarity with Syria. The capture last month by IS/Da’esh of
the ancient city of Palmyra, a favourite tourist attraction in the Syrian
desert, caused a global media outcry for the protection
of “our universal heritage”. However instead of the ancient ruins, the first
thing that IS/Da’esh destroyed in Palmyra was the notorious Tadmor
prison, explosives and all. No traces or evidence has been left in Tadmor to
indict Assad and the Syrian regime of crimes against humanity here. How very
smart.

This week, several aerial
bombardments by the Syrian regime’s army have severely damaged a wall near the
Temple of Bel in the ancient city of Palmyra—there has been no global outcry
yet.

Today, it is crystal clear that the
international community has utterly failed Syria and the Syrians. The
international community should act now to prevent a slide into the ever-deeper
abyss in which Syria finds itself. Freedom and safety for the Syrians is
freedom and safety for all of us. It is my deepest hope that the beautiful Syrian
children I met on my Syria trip last year will grow up safely, one day in a
free Syria without repression. They deserve it.