Syrians protest al-Assad’s participation in Arab League summit

 

 'Thousands of Syrians have protested across the country against some Arab countries’ normalisation of relations with President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the country’s return to the Arab League.

 The protests on Friday coincided with al-Assad’s participation in the Arab League summit taking place in Saudi Arabia, marking the Syrian president’s return to the summit after 12 years.

 Thousands protested in Idlib, al-Bab, Azaz, Jarabulus, and Afrin, among other cities, under the slogan, “Criminal al-Assad Never Represents Syria”.

 Demonstrations also took place in six cities outside Syria: Vienna, Amsterdam, London, Vaile, Stockholm and Lyon.



 In the northwestern Syrian rebel-held city of Idlib, hundreds participated in the protests.

 “We demonstrated today to remind those who are seeking to normalise their relations with the al-Assad régime that the Great Syrian Revolution started spontaneously as a response to the internal suffocation we endured under the Assad régime,” said Ibrahim Aboud, one of the participants in the demonstration and a displaced civilian from Maarat al-Numan in northern Idlib.

 “When we first protested in 2011, we didn’t ask permission from anyone, and we didn’t take into considering the regional and international environment surrounding Syria.”

 Aboud said he could not accept the Arab countries’ move, whether it was political, diplomatic, military, or economic, considering that the government has killed, displaced and imprisoned millions of Syrians for 12 years.

 “We are determined to achieve the goals of the revolution and liberate Syria from the Assad régime and its thugs,” Aboud said.



 The Arab League suspended Syria’s membership in May 2011 following the brutal way al-Assad handled the protests, as well as the civilians who started the Syrian revolution that year.

 “Today, we send a message to the Arab and international community rejecting the return of the criminal Bashar al-Assad to the Arab League. They should have held him accountable instead of shaking his hands, which are stained with the blood of the Syrian people,” said Naif Shaban, a human rights activist and displaced civilian from Wadi Barada in the Damascus countryside.

 “The normalisation will not change anything for us because this has been taking place under the table for the last 12 years. Today, it is happening publicly,” Shaban said.



 In the Syrian city of Al-Bab, about 1,000 people staged a similar protest.

 Jalal Talawi, one of the protest organisers in the city, said demonstrators were showing their firm rejection of al-Assad’s presence at the summit and normalisation with this “malicious régime”.

 “Many people today were displaced by al-Assad’s régime and its supporters,” Talawi said.

 “Our message is crystal clear: Our revolution will continue until we achieve its goal and that’s freedom and liberation from this régime. Al-Assad doesn’t represent us as Syrians and we sent a clear message today to everyone supporting or opposing the revolution, that we will not accept this régime and are continuing until it falls and until we get all of our detainees back. We will continue despite the entire world standing in our way.”

 In Azaz, a refuge for Syrians who fled from other parts of the country amid the war, 700 people gathered to protest.



 Nor was Syria’s return to the Arab League universally embraced in the Saudi city of Jeddah where the meeting took place.

 Qatar’s emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani departed the city after leading the Qatari delegation at the summit. The Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed Arab official as saying that Sheikh Tamim left the summit before the start of al-Assad’s speech.

 Qatar had previously opposed Syria’s return to the Arab League. Following its return to the Arab League, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said the country’s position “on normalisation with the régime had not changed”.

 The spokesperson added that Qatar will still support the “Arab consensus and will not be an obstacle to that”.

 Shaban, a protester in Idlib, added that people “appreciated Qatar’s stance against normalisation and their support for the rights of the Syrian people”.

 “We wish other countries had a similar stance,” Shaban added.'

Omar Alshogre, Syrian dissident: ‘Under torture they forced me to say I had killed policemen... I was 15 years old’

 

 Omar al-Shogre:

 'I have lost my father, my brothers, and I spent three years in these prison cells, but even so, this revolution is worth making: we have monsters in power.

 When they arrest you and take you to prison, they interrogate you and ask you questions that are impossible to answer. For example, how many police officers have you killed in your life. I answered none. Not just because I didn’t kill any, but because none had died. But under torture they forced me to say that I had killed policemen, in order to designate me as a criminal and a terrorist. I was 15 years old. And while you are being tortured, you hear other prisoners begging to be killed due to the pain they are suffering.

 I was in prison 215, in Damascus. My assignment was to move the corpses of the dead prisoners to the room where their deaths were certified. You are in shock. You don’t understand what’s going on. How is it possible for a guard who looks like a father to treat you like this? But, being so young, you are more likely to adapt to the situation. There is a routine.

 You got up at 4 a.m. Then they forced you to remove the corpses. They fed you, once a day. You went to the bathroom. Then they tortured you. And then you had 14 more hours in the cell with other prisoners. They weren’t criminals, they were good people. On the right, you might have a doctor who helps you heal the wounds. On the left, a psychologist who helps you too. Opposite from you, a lawyer and a professor. If you spend three days in prison, you don’t worry about learning anything. But if you spend years in prison, you have to adapt, you have to learn.



 I had tuberculosis, I weighed 34 kilos. My mother bribed the guards and judges with a lot of money to get me out of prison. They took me to Turkey and from there I went to Greece by boat and then to Sweden, where I got medical treatment. I was arrested for the first time at 15, released shortly afterwards, arrested again at 17 and released at 20.

 Instead of having the normal experience of a high school student, I had to become an adult quickly. I learned to survive. I had to fight for a cause that I was too young to understand. That being said, prison made me who I am today. It gave me the strength to fight against the dictatorship and injustice.



 The idea that the Syrian régime fought against ISIS is false, because ISIS emerged in 2014 and the régime killed people from 2011 until now. The world becomes desensitized to bad news: this has been going on for 12 years, but it is allowed to continue. We shouldn’t get used to it. Behind these photographs and these corpses there are emotions, feelings, families. Grief affects not only incarcerated people, but also their families and friends. The Syrian régime has imprisoned and tortured more than 1.5 million people over the years, and right now there are more than 100,000 people in these prisons. In other words, there is not a single family in Syria that does not have someone imprisoned or tortured. It is a régime that has killed more than half a million people, displaced 14 million and continues to torture. This régime should not stay in power, Assad must fall: he is the worst war criminal we have ever had. Did ISIS commit worse crimes than Assad? No. It didn’t kill that many people. Both are terrible, but the Syrian régime is the reason we had ISIS in Syria.

 The West should help the opposition. Do you know what the West is doing today? Hoping that the opposition alone will change everything, but we can’t do it without support. The régime has survived because it has allies: without Iran, Russia and China, it would fall in two weeks.

 It’s not like the Assad régime has won the war: they don’t control the whole country, more than seven million people are out of their control. But he is trying to sell the story that he has won the war to force the world to accept it.

 The most disappointing thing is that the Arab population does not take to the streets to protest the return of a dictator who killed not only Syrians, but also Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians... These leaders despise human rights violations. Bringing Assad back will not make things better: a political solution cannot be negotiated with a government that continues to use violence and kill. This régime takes advantage of the weakness of the international community and the lack of pressure from governments such as the United States on countries that normalize relations with Assad.'

Syrian refugees fear normalization with Assad. Because it means they will have to return—and not by choice

 

 Arwa Damon:

 ' “We would always hear talk about how Lebanon would start forcing Syrians to go back,” Safa, a twenty-year-old Syrian refugee in Lebanon, tells me. “But we never took it all that seriously. Not until now. Now it’s a rollercoaster.”

 The news of the Arab League bringing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad back into its fold after a decade of civil war has exacerbated a constant, almost paralyzing fear that Syrian refugees have felt for years. No one who lived through this era can forget the barrel bombs indiscriminately raining hell down on civilian neighborhoods; the roar of Syrian and Russian fighter jets bombing schools and hospitals; the massacres of entire families—including children slaughtered for no apparent reason other than evil itself—and the months-long sieges of neighborhoods that left populations so hungry they ate grass.

 But it would seem that it’s now in the interest of Arab League nations to move past these crimes. They argue that Assad’s isolation did little to alter his behavior and that re-opening communication is the best way to tackle the threat of terrorism, the growing drug trade flowing through Syria, and the headache caused by Syrian refugees. After all, if Syria is no longer a pariah state in the eyes of Arab nations, then surely its citizens can return. It’s a prospect that terrifies Syrians who fled.

 They fear that this “normalization” of ties between the Arab League and Syria will boost the narrative that “Syria is safe now,” giving further justification to governments, politicians, and citizens of countries who have wanted to rid themselves of their Syrian refugee population for years. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 5.5 million Syrian refugees live in its neighboring countries. This does not count those who fled and made it to Europe, where many countries would like to—and in some cases have already—sent them back home.

 The “Syrians can go back home” narrative is nothing new—it has been parroted for years. This action by the Arab League will potentially give any country wanting to deport Syrians the smokescreen it needs to justify its actions.

 Safa is a university student who has lived as a Syrian refugee in Lebanon longer than she has lived in her homeland. As a child, she lived with the fear of being forced to go back home. As a young adult, it now permeates every aspect of her existence, growing by the day, and launching her into a constant state of anxiety.

 “It’s crazy what is happening now,” she laments. “Imagine, they have a curfew for us now. As Syrians, we’re not allowed outside after 7 pm in my village in the south. They say it’s for the security of the Lebanese.”

 The Lebanese army has been carrying out increasing raids across the country in areas inhabited by Syrian refugees, detaining and deporting hundreds, according to Amnesty International and other rights organizations.

 Individuals detained are dumped straight into the hands of Syrian authorities, where enough are reportedly arbitrarily detained, forcibly conscripted, or just disappeared that it sends waves of fear through the refugee population.

 Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has already cited a “decline in intense military tension in many areas” in Syria, as he called on the international community to facilitate a new approach to rid Lebanon of Syrian refugees, whether it be sending Syrians back home or to a third country. Lebanon has been increasingly scapegoating its refugee population, leading to a stunning increase in aggression and hatred.

 Safa and her family live in fear within their own home. They recently moved towns and were visited by the Lebanese security forces, who informed them that they must register with all their documents or be deported immediately.

 It’s not just fear of the possibility of deportation, even though their papers are in order. It’s the hatred that serves as an equally strong driver of the fear: “How secure is my life here?” It permeates every aspect of Safa’s life to the point that her insides clench each time she steps outside. She’s a university student working after class to help support her studies and her ten-person family.

 “Our neighbors, even my friends at school, my boss at work, you feel their hatred of Syrians,” she explains. “They say things like, ‘Oh, you came, and now you’re leeching off of us. Go back to your country. Half of you are thieves.’”

 Anti-Syrian refugee sentiment has been snowballing lately, especially in the two countries that host the largest number of refugees: Lebanon—where Safa lives—and Turkey—where the refugee crisis is in the top three concerns driving voters in Turkey’s razor-thin presidential elections, which are going to a run-off scheduled for May 28.

 “I cried, I cried, and I asked my father about all of this.” Weam, a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian woman living in Turkey, explains to me. “First, it was Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and even Turkey is talking about it.”

 The Assad régime killed Weam’s brother, uncle, and grandfather. She can’t erase the memory of seeing her brother’s lifeless body in an ambulance on her laptop; of knowing, at that moment, that she would never get a chance to say goodbye. Weam will never forget the way that her family found her grandfather’s scorched corpse after régime forces burned down his home, knowing that he was still inside.

 “I am angry, frustrated,” Weam says, her voice shaking with emotion. “Twelve years of fighting, being displaced within Syria and outside of Syria. All of this, just to be erased, to go back to normal ties?”

 The pain is coupled with the uncertainty of the fate of those she loves. Weam is among the Syrians who successfully pursued a path to citizenship in Turkey. Her sisters are still waiting.

 “They are terrified,” Weam says. “They are just waiting to see what will happen after the elections.”

 Weam is unsure who to vote for or if she should even vote at all.

 “Safe repatriation” of Syria’s more than 3.5 million refugees in Turkey is the rhetoric swirling around and is an openly-stated pledge of the opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. But it’s worth remembering that talks were started with the Syrian régime by the government of the incumbent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Add to that Syria’s ascension into the Arab League, and the argument of “Syria is safe, people can go back home” takes on a new life no matter who wins.

 “Me as a Syrian, I have no hope in the Arab League,” Malik, a thirty-year-old Syrian refugee in Turkey, who has been waiting for his citizenship to go through, explains. “I was more upset by the rapprochement between Syria and Turkey. And, now, if it’s the party that says it supports refugees that wins, there will be a backlash against us, and they will have to do something. And if it’s the party that wants to kick us out, they will have to demonstrate that they are doing that. We don’t know how it’s going to materialize.”

 For many, going back to Syria is a non-starter. Safa’s family, for example, is seriously considering having her take the deadly journey to Libya and then to Italy. It’s not something she wants to do, but her family is pressuring her to try, thinking that it might lead to a chain of events that will allow them better and safer prospects.

 Safety for those who fled is not just defined by whether bombs and bullets are falling. Much more terrifying than that is the fear of disappearance; fear of régime forces that arrive in the dead of the night to whisk someone away; fear of being stopped at a checkpoint and disappearing only to languish in Assad’s prisons; fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person only to be recuperated by loved ones as a corpse; fear of all of the factors that were the drivers of the revolution in the first place. None of that has changed.

 It’s why Syrians who fled endure the misery of being in Lebanon. It’s why internally-displaced Syrians stay in a tent rather than return to their cities and towns. It’s why Syrians in Jordan would rather live in limbo than return. And it’s why Syrians in Turkey will suffer the blatant racism, aggression, and politicization of their plight.

 No global power, no politician, no population has ever really understood what it is to be a Syrian refugee. Their life and suffering is merely rhetoric to be manipulated. What better way to manipulate the Syrian refugee “crisis”—to justify sending Syrians back home—than to be able to point to the Arab League’s acceptance of Assad and say, “But, look, things are going back to normal, relations are normalizing, things are fine. You can all go back home.” '

Time is running out for quake-hit, war-ravaged northwest Syria

 

 'As soon as we crossed the border into Syria, the fields of olive trees stretched as far my eyes could see. Row after row, until we reached Atmeh. Over the past 12 years of conflict, what was formerly a village has grown into a town, with a mixture of permanent buildings and tents spilling down the hillsides.

 Our destination was Aqrabat Hospital, where I was leading a surgical mission to train local doctors and provide specialist orthopaedic and plastic surgical care to survivors of February’s devastating earthquake.

 The need is astonishing. After hearing that specialist doctors were visiting, 2,000 patients had travelled to the hospital over the previous week. In the rooms above the operation theatres, doctors are trained in skills to enable them to manage complex trauma injuries, whether inflicted by earthquakes or the ongoing conflict.

 Aqrabat sits in Syria’s northwest, a region sustained by a remarkable network of civil society organisations and NGOs, yet one that is also uniquely vulnerable. The hospital is among a network that serves a population of around four million, the majority of whom are dependent on humanitarian aid.

 Some 2.6 million of those residents have already been forcibly displaced from their homes several times before by the conflict, from places we remember as headlines from years ago: Ghouta, Dara’a, Homs, Aleppo. People have faced a series of crises including food and fuel shortages and a cholera outbreak.



 Northwest Syria is the last territorial outpost of the Syrian Revolution and its quasi-independence is a source of irritation for the régime of President Bashar Assad, whose goal is to enforce his government’s rule over the whole of Syria again.

 What protection the northwest had is being eroded at speed as the United Arab Emirates welcomed Assad to Abu Dhabi in March, and Jordan, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia have indicated a willingness to resume diplomatic ties with Damascus. On Sunday, the Arab League began the process of allowing Syria back into the fold.

 Colleagues in northwest Syria have welcomed the United States’ and United Kingdom’s stated opposition to the normalisation of Assad, but question why the US Caesar Act and UK and EU sanctions régimes have not been used to deter those extending the hand of friendship.

 As the Turkish election heads towards a likely run-off, the stakes for northwest Syria could not be higher. Both Presidential candidates have said that Syrian refugees will be returned and suggested that the nature of the Turkish security presence in the enclave could change.

 Turkey hosts some 3.6 million Syrian refugees and has supported them over the past 12 years, but Syrians I met spoke to a change in atmosphere. The environment had become more hostile, with their children being bullied in school and several had applied for visas for other states as an insurance policy, to avoid being returned back to Syria.

 The UK must not abandon Syria.



 Cuts to the UK Development budget are being felt in the northwest. Time and again I heard from those I met that the UK was a valued friend but they were increasingly forced to do more with less in the face of soaring demand.

 But, as Minister of State for Development Andrew Mitchell identified, returning to 0.7 per cent is not the whole story. New approaches that reflect the changing world around us are just as necessary.

 Criticism is growing of the Western-led, expeditionary model of humanitarian aid. When making funding decisions, the UK should look beyond the big UN agencies and established International NGOs and diversify to give greater support to locally-led humanitarian organisations.

 Such organisations are better placed to understand the needs of the communities they serve and effect change that is sustainable. It will also better empower civil society leaders, who are frequently a bulwark against more radical players, thus furthering stabilisation goals.

 Local healthcare and humanitarian workers are also uniquely positioned to bear witness to crimes against humanity and have done so at critical junctures of the Syrian conflict, including the chemical weapons attack on eastern Ghouta in 2013 and the siege of eastern Aleppo in 2016.

 Supporting open societies and defending human rights are oft-stated goals of UK foreign, development and defence policy on the basis that these create a more secure global environment.

 The most effective examples of these are found at the community level and the UK should focus on providing targeted support to them alongside the larger UN agencies and INGOs.

 UK diplomacy and aid cannot deliver open societies, but as former DfID staffers Graham Teskey and Tom Wingfield state in their 2021 paper, we should understand how power is organised, where the plausible sources of positive change lie, and tuck in behind locally-driven change processes.

 Examples abound in northwest Syria, including UOSSM, the Independent Doctors Association (IDA), the Syrian Board of Medical Specialties (SBOMS) and our friends and long-standing partners at Syria Relief-Action for Humanity.

 Among my meetings in Syria was with a group of women who were leading initiatives to encourage female political participation, among them a lawyer, activist, journalist and pharmacist. Their clear message to me was that they knew best how to reform their society in a way that was authentic and true to their values: “We can do this ourselves. We will find the solutions within, they will not come from outside.”

 Their work and that of Syria’s healthcare workers is an inspiration, but they are vulnerable. Northwest Syria is in danger and the region awaits the outcome of the Turkish elections with trepidation.

 Now is the moment for the UK to assemble a coalition of sympathetic states and organisations to ensure that northwest Syria is not abandoned to its fate. Those living there have endured enough and have despite all they have encountered created networks and institutions that are serving the people.

 A future political settlement must include security guarantees for northwest Syria, no compulsory return of refugees and the preservation of unconditional humanitarian access to Turkey regardless of any Syria-Turkey rapprochement.

 We must not let them down.'