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.'