The Human Cost of Normalizing Assad

 

 'The first time Yousef was detained in Lebanon, he had just been smuggled across the Syrian border. An anti-régime activist from Syria’s Damascus countryside, Yousef co-managed an opposition Facebook page during the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When a trafficker brought him to Lebanon three years later, Yousef knew he may never see his homeland again. But as he now sees countries taking steps to normalize relations with Assad, he worries he’ll be forced back prematurely.

 Shortly after crossing into Lebanon, Yousef was stopped in the border town of Arsal at a checkpoint run by the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah, the most powerful political actor in Lebanon and a key ally of Assad. Passed to the custody of Lebanese military intelligence, Yousef was held in detention for 33 days and faced repeated beatings. He’s one of hundreds of Syrians rights groups say Lebanese authorities have arbitrarily detained and tortured, some of whom have been subjected to sleep deprivation, electric shocks, and mock executions. Yousef was released on the condition he find an employer that week to sponsor his stay in Lebanon. Seven years later, he has yet to find one.

 Now 30 years old, Yousef has lived illegally in Lebanon ever since. He’s hardly alone—only 16 percent of Syrians over the age of 14 currently in Lebanon have been granted residency, according to the United Nations (down from 20 percent in 2020). This isn’t an accident: Lebanese authorities have passed a series of regulations since 2015 discouraging refugees from staying. Permits are out of reach for most Syrians, who can’t afford the $200 annual renewal fee. “It’s all about money,” said Yousef, whose fine today would be $1,600.

 Most Syrians lack work permits too. Even if Yousef had one, he would still be barred from most jobs—and certainly any his business administration studies would warrant. Lebanon only authorizes Syrians to work in the construction, agriculture, and cleaning sectors. Yousef has worked his share of gigs in the informal economy over the years—as a barber, in a cafe, at a telephone shop—though he’s currently unemployed. “The wages didn’t even cover my taxi to work,” he said. At only $2 to $6 a day, they certainly couldn’t cover the $800 a potential sponsor demanded for patronage under the kafala system, which connects foreign workers to local sponsors.



 Yousef’s lack of residency status led to his second detention. In Beirut without a sponsor, he turned to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), hoping to at least qualify for aid. (Yousef said he hasn’t received any as a single man, with most of the money going to families.) The UNHCR “recorded” him for assistance, since Lebanon stopped allowing the agency to “register” refugees in 2015—another effort to restrict residency claims.

 But soon after being recorded, Yousef moved from Beirut to Tripoli, Lebanon, citing the cheaper cost of living in Lebanon’s second largest city and less discrimination in the Sunni-majority north. (The Syrian opposition is largely Sunni against Assad’s Alawite minority government.) When he had to return to Beirut in 2018 to renew his UNHCR certificate, Yousef was stopped at a checkpoint and taken into custody. This time, he was only held for three days, but once again, he was given one week’s notice to find a sponsor—and again, he couldn’t afford to pay one off.

 Because of Yousef’s refugee status, the warning was mostly symbolic; it’s against international law for Lebanon to deport him. But that hasn’t stopped Lebanese authorities from trying to force Syrians out. Policies have aimed to make their lives as difficult as possible and promote “voluntary return,” which Lebanon has provided buses back to Syria for.

 Over the past few years, dozens of municipalities have evicted Syrians and instituted curfews and wage caps. Authorities have demolished concrete tents in refugee camps and shuttered nonpermitted workers’ shops. “We’ve really never seen such blatant discrimination by authorities against Syrian refugees in both rhetoric and practice the way we’ve seen it in Lebanon,” said Sara Kayyali, Human Rights Watch’s Syria researcher.

 Lebanese authorities have said policies that single out Syrians aim to protect their workers’ security and economic well-being. A spokesperson for Ras Baalbek, a municipality that issued a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for Syrians in November 2021, told L’Orient Today that the decision “was set as a measurement to reduce the rate of thefts happening in the area.” Ras Baalbek also issued a daily wage cap of less than $2 per day for Syrian men at Lebanon’s black market exchange rate, which the spokesperson said was because “Syrian workers are already getting international aid and are paid in dollars every day from foreign funds.”

 Some policies have actively removed Syrians too, and more than 6,000 refugees who have arrived since April 2019 have been deported under a ruling by the Higher Defence Council. The COVID-19 pandemic halted most legal crossings and deportations for 2020 and 2021, but Yousef has watched recent regional developments with alarm. He worries more and more that the decision to return to Syria won’t be his to make—and he fears if he’s forced back, his 33-day detention the last time he crossed will feel like nothing compared to what lies ahead.



 Yousef can hardly imagine a situation worse than the one he lives with in Lebanon—except across the border in Syria. Refugees who return there face arbitrary detention, torture, rape, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, according to recent reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Yousef said he can never go home under the Assad régime; he’s wanted by Syrian authorities on “terrorism” charges and would still have to complete the mandatory military service for men ages 18 to 42.

 Yet with Assad now controlling around 70 percent of the territory and with fighting reduced, some European countries have started to inch toward Lebanon’s playbook. “They want to turn the page and pretend the last decade hasn’t happened,” Kayyali said.

 Denmark, in particular, has stripped the “temporary residency” status of refugees from Damascus or the Damascus countryside—Yousef’s home—even as dozens of human rights abuse cases are documented near the capital. Nobody else has followed Denmark yet, but “other countries are looking at Denmark’s model and wondering if they can do the same,” Kayyali said.

 Meanwhile, regional dynamics are shifting in the Middle East. In November, Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited Assad in Damascus, making him the most senior Emirati official to travel to Syria since the war began. This followed a phone call one month prior between Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Assad, also the first in a decade. Bahrain has now appointed its first ambassador to Syria since early in the war.

 Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat, said in an interview he doesn’t expect the international community to change its position on refugees for now. However, he expects repatriation will be central to any future international agreement to end Syria’s civil war. “The time’s not ready yet” for most countries to try to send their refugees back to Syria, he said. “But Syrian refugees will be the price to settle the Syrian crisis.”

 Assad’s close relationship with Iran also complicates refugee return, Barabandi said. If the mostly Sunni refugee population returns, Syria’s demographics will complicate Shiite-power Iran’s regional ambitions. “Iran wants to have a big influence on Syria’s future,” Barabandi added. “A large Sunni Arab population makes that almost impossible. That’s why Iran never talks about the refugee issue.”

 Arab states are welcoming Assad back into the fold in part to counter Iranian influence, Barabandi said, though he also emphasized that each state has its own distinct interests—such as diplomatic influence for the United Arab Emirates, which has also made gestures toward Iran, and economic benefits for Jordan. Several members of the Arab League are now pushing to readmit Syria, whose membership was suspended in 2011.

 The United States has publicly denounced its allies’ overtures toward Assad and maintains its own sanctions on Syria. “What we have not done and what we do not intend to do is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad or lifted a single sanction on Syria or changed our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in October 2021.

 But some think U.S. allies would not act without a tacit go-ahead from Washington. “When the UAE and Jordan came for their own reasons to the Americans, the U.S. didn’t have any reason to say no,” Barabandi said. “The Americans don’t want the régime to collapse in Syria—that’s one of the lessons they learned from Iraq.”



 Assad may remain in power, but he rules over a country in shambles. Syria’s economy—driven to ruin by corruption and a decade of war—has only further decayed since 2020 with the pandemic, new sanctions, and a parallel crisis next door in Lebanon. (Many rich Syrians’ money is trapped in Lebanese banks.) Syria’s currency is in freefall, and more than 12 million Syrians, of the 18 million who remain in the country, now face hunger. Basic item prices soared by 236 percent and oil prices by 500 percent over the course of 2020.

 Although Assad might not want refugees who oppose his rule of return, he does want the aid dollars and investment that will come with them, both Barabandi and Kayyali said. “The Syrian government has adopted a legal and policy framework that’s designed to co-opt aid to their benefit,” Kayyali added. “Any aid that goes in benefits the Syrian government, its projects, its plans, to the detriment of people on the ground in need, to the detriment of their human rights obligations.”

 Currently, that aid goes to refugee host countries like Lebanon and Jordan. But after so many years of Syrians’ displacement, “donor funds are drying up,” Kayyali said. Yearly international funding for countries hosting Syrian refugees dropped by $1.39 billion between 2017 and 2021. For Lebanon, the timing couldn’t be worse; it’s dealing with its own economic meltdown, which has driven three-quarters of Lebanon’s 6.7 million residents (only 4.5 million of whom are Lebanese citizens) into poverty.

 These hardships have amplified the already rampant discrimination against Syrians in Lebanon, who form the second largest per capita refugee population in the world (behind Venezuelans in Aruba). With more than 815,000 Syrians registered as refugees in Lebanon—a number the Lebanese government estimates is closer to 1.5 million—Lebanese politicians have used Syrians as scapegoats for the country’s illnesses. They portray refugees as competing for jobs, receiving disproportionate aid, and sucking the state’s limited resources. “We will not be replaced on this land, which bore prophets and saints; not by a refugee, nor a displaced person, nor a corrupt person,” tweeted Gebran Bassil, the head of Lebanon’s largest Christian party and the son-in-law of Syrian President Michel Aoun, in 2019.

 The numbers tell a different story: Nine out of 10 Syrian refugee households in Lebanon now live in extreme poverty, with roughly half of all families food insecure, according to the United Nations. The COVID-19 death rate for Syrian refugees is four times Lebanon’s national average, as refugees struggle to access medical care. Refugees have been victims of hate crimes and their camps targets of arson attacks.

 Larger geopolitical dynamics are out of refugees’ hands, who just struggle to get by day to day. But they’re the ones who most bear the costs of these changes on the ground. Stuck between a bad situation and a worse one, some have decided to risk the journey home to Syria. That so many double back to Lebanon, however, is testament to their harrowing experiences.



 Down an alleyway of the Shatila refugee camp filled with garbage and sewage, Nada lives with her husband, six children, brother-in-law, and his wife in a two-bedroom apartment that is falling apart. Above the home’s entryway, two pipes burst out of a ceiling that lacks plaster. In the kitchen sit the remnants of a gas cylinder that caught fire in November 2021, burning the family’s food supply.

 All of the families in this overcrammed, three-story building in the center of southern Beirut’s largest Palestinian refugee camp are Syrian. Their situation isn’t unique. According to the United Nations, 57 percent of Syrian refugee households in Lebanon live in “dangerous, substandard or overcrowded” conditions.

 On this November day, Nada’s husband, Khaled, isn’t home. As he does almost every day, he left in the morning to wait under a bridge near the refugee camp, hoping for somebody to hire him. He’ll move furniture, mix cement, carry bricks, or work in fields—whatever they’ll pay him to do. He’s not educated. He’s not literate. His options are limited.

 With bad eyes and shoulders though, Khaled can’t do the toughest jobs, and with stiff competition, he only finds work 10 to 15 days a month. He provides the family’s only source of income, yet the $2 to $4 wages usually can’t cover a day’s living expenses. “If we are very lucky, it gets us through one day,” Nada said. But even then, it’s just the basics: bread and water, potatoes or tomatoes. Certainly no luxuries like diapers for her newborn baby.

 None of Nada’s children are in school. Like their parents, none of them can read. Lebanon doesn’t make education easy for Syrian refugees, having adopted policies that block thousands of refugee children without residency or educational records from the classroom.

 To survive, Nada lives off debt. At least living among Palestinians, she said she doesn’t endure the same racism many Syrians find from some Lebanese. At the nearby corner store, there’s trust—they let her get the diapers and pay later.

 But back in 2018, her husband was barely working. They couldn’t make the rent, and their landlord cut their electricity and water. The children were hungry; they missed open spaces. “For the kids, Shatila was like jail,” she said. “There were no places to play.”

 Khaled still fears arrest and forced military service back in Syria, but as a woman in her mid-30s, Nada wouldn’t be conscripted. She wasn’t wanted for anti-régime activism either. So she took her children home to Syria.



 This wouldn’t be the first time Nada and her children lived in Syria without Khaled. In 2015, he first crossed into Lebanon without them. They hoped life would get better in Syria and Khaled could come back. But it got worse. Their town in the Aleppo countryside was under the Islamic State’s control and Syrian government bombardment.

 After a year, Nada decided she couldn’t live without her husband. Smugglers took her and the kids (there were four at the time) by boat up Lake Assad to the Manbij, Syrian, countryside—which was under Kurdish control at the time—for $300. Nada and her daughter were in one boat, and her three sons were in another. But during the journey north, bombs rained down. For four days, Nada thought her sons had been killed.

 She ended up finding them with relatives in Manbij, and after another six months and another $300, the family headed to the Syria-Lebanon border. Like Khaled, they exited Syria legally—though Syrian border police demanded an extra bribe per person—and entered Lebanon illegally.

 Nada lasted less than two years in Lebanon. Despite the last journey’s trauma and the fact that she was pregnant, she had had enough. “My family told me to stay in Lebanon,” she said, but she didn’t listen. On her way out, Lebanese border patrols issued her the permanent reentry ban now given to Syrians who exit legally without paying a fine.

 More than 280,000 refugees have returned to Syria since 2016, according to the United Nations. That’s likely an undercount, since many refugees, such as Nada, do not inform authorities of their comings and goings. (It’s also just a fraction of the estimated 6.8 million Syrian refugees worldwide.)

 After she entered Syria, Nada faced checkpoint after checkpoint, but she eventually made it back to her home village. There, she found her home completely destroyed. It had been bombed and looted. The furniture had been stolen. The home was unlivable—but Nada and her kids lived there anyway. With neighbors, they made cement and makeshift bricks of hay and mud to partially rebuild.

 But they had almost no electricity. No gas. No telephone lines. The village’s infrastructure was destroyed. Nada found day work in the fields picking crops, yet she never earned enough to survive. There were food shortages, Nada was in debt and the kids were hungry, more so than in Lebanon. The nearest doctors and pharmacies were roughly 60 miles away in Aleppo, Syria, risking passage through many checkpoints.

 Nada also didn’t feel any safer after returning to Syria than before she left. She lived with the same sense of fear and insecurity that permeates everyday life in the country. She was never detained or tortured, but a cousin of hers disappeared. She still hasn’t found out what happened to him.

 Before she left Lebanon, Nada couldn’t imagine missing it. Life was so hard there. But it was even harder back home. So in late 2020, Nada once more headed for the border—this time with five kids. With her permanent ban though, she couldn’t go to an official crossing. A smuggler took Nada and her children all the way from her home in the Aleppo countryside to Beirut, through the mountains of Homs, for $250.

 In a survey of Syrians conducted by the United Nations, 70 percent expressed a desire to return home someday. But 9 out of 10 people surveyed also said they don’t plan to go back in the next 12 months—even though they can’t meet their basic needs in their host countries. No matter how tough their situation gets, most refugees said conditions back home will determine their thinking on return; Nada being driven out of Lebanon by discriminatory policies was an unusual case.

 In a July 2021 statement, the UNHCR said “as discussions on the return of displaced Syrians pick up, it’s important to ensure international principles guide any efforts to support the return of those displaced.” The statement added the UNHCR “welcomes all efforts to build an environment that enables refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) to exercise their right to return,” and “all stakeholders must work to collectively address the barriers to return as expressed by refugees themselves, if we are to increase the likelihood that this becomes a realistic, safe and sustainable solution for a larger number of people.”

 But Kayyali said she’s not sure that fostering a safe environment for return is possible while Assad remains in power. “Without serious reform of the Syrian government and its apparatus, I think it’s highly unlikely that conditions will be in place for refugees to return safely and voluntarily,” she said.

 Since Nada’s return to Lebanon, life has only become more difficult than before she left. But now that she’s seen the alternative, Nada has no plans to return to Syria again. “Never,” she emphasized. “I will stay here, whatever happens.”

 Yousef, for his part, hopes that option—“stay here, whatever happens”—will remain.'

Displaced Syrians say they 'will return without Assad'

 

 'Internally displaced Syrians from the northern city of Aleppo rallied for their right to return to their homes on Wednesday, on the fifth anniversary of their displacement.

 Protesters took to the streets in Idlib province carrying signs reading "we will return without Assad [in power]", expressing their will to live free from the rule of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

 Aleppo was seized by the Syrian armed opposition in July 2012, before being recaptured by Assad's régime in December 2016 after a five-month siege and battle backed by Russian air power that left the historic city in ruins and killed thousands.

 "The demonstration is very important to remind the world of the criminality practiced against us by the Assad régime and its allies," said photographer and reporter Bilal al-Hammoud, who was displaced from Maarat al-Numan in the Idlib province but also attended the demonstration.

 Though al-Hammoud wasn't displaced from Aleppo, he explained he "share[s] the same feelings with other protesters" due to their shared goal of returning to their homes.



 "I wanted to participate... to tell Bashar al-Assad that I will return to Aleppo... we are continuing our revolution until my daughter can grow up in Aleppo," said Fateh Raslan, a man displaced from Aleppo.

 “On the fifth anniversary... we decided to be present to demand the right of return without the Assad régime... we have left our city by force, but we will continue our revolution until we can return," said Bilal al-Abdullah, also displaced from Aleppo.

 For many forcibly displaced Syrians, memories of the horror they experienced were embedded deep within them, fuelling their motivation to persist and fight for a free Syria.

 "Aleppo is the remains of our martyrs, the remains of our children that remained under the rubble, and it is our duty to remember them always at every moment... the blood of our martyrs is our fuel” said media activist Ibrahim Radwan, also from Aleppo.

 The Syrian revolution began on 15 March 2011, before the Assad régime violently cracked down on peaceful protests demanding democratic reform.'

Under Assad: Syria's multi-billion dollar drug business

 

 'After more than ten years of civil war, Syria is economically on the ground. According to estimates by the UN, more than 13 million people out of the approximately 20 million inhabitants are dependent on humanitarian aid. The régime under ruler Bashar al-Assad and his followers found their own answer to the economic misery caused by war and sanctions: the illegal drug Captagon.

 As current research by the New York Times (NYT) shows, Syria has developed into a new drug state in recent years with a mass production of Captagon in particular. This synthetic drug is of particular concern in the Gulf region and increasingly also in Jordan. This multi-billion dollar drug industry was built by powerful associates and relatives of Assad. In addition to Captagon, according to regional security officials, more dangerous drugs such as crystal meth are increasingly finding their way onto the transport routes.

 The system is sophisticated. The production facilities are spread all over the country, and new methods of hiding-place are constantly being used to transport the pills - in hollow pomegranates, in coffee packages and enclosed in lead ingots, which are transported on via our own smuggling networks. As the Economist reported in the summer, production and sales are under the control of the fourth armored division of the Syrian army, which is led by Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad. According to the NYT, Hezbollah also has its fingers in the game. Production sites are militarily guarded or are in a restricted military area.

 The NYT based its research on interviews with law enforcement officers in several countries, incumbent and former US officials and Syrians with knowledge of the drug trade. Based on this information and on the basis of pills also confiscated in Europe, it is shown how much drug exports from Syria have recently increased. Drug experts believe that the material found is only a small fraction of the actual amount. In any case, it shows the enormous increase in the recent past.

 This year alone, according to the NYT, over 250 million pills have been confiscated - more than 18 times what was found four years ago. There were also seizures in several European countries. Only last year were 84 million pills seized in Italy, this May in Malaysia 94 million pills were found sealed in rubber wagon wheels. 

 The main buyers for Syrian drugs in the Gulf States are, however, primarily in Saudi Arabia. The previous transit state, Jordan, is also increasingly becoming a buyer. The amount seized in the previous year has doubled compared to the previous year, according to the Jordanian drug unit. Consumers are primarily young people.

 The Syrian régime could also use this in regional power struggles. Malik al-Abdeh, a Syrian observer close to the opposition, says the régime is using "drugs as a weapon against the Gulf States": "The message is: normalize relations or we will destroy your youth," he told the Economist.



 The drug with the amphetamine fenethylline was used by a German pharmaceutical company from the 1960s as a drug against ADHD, for example. Because it was addictive, it was banned internationally in the late 1980s. It was still produced illegally. During the Syrian war, fighters from all sides took the drug - including members of the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS). In the Gulf region, Captagon is still heavily consumed in leisure time. The illegal version of Captagon usually includes several amphetamines, caffeine, and other fillers.

 The entire drug business dwarfs Syria's legal exports - especially agricultural products - and is reportedly done with the support of the régime. According to the NYT, the Captagon seizures last year were worth around 2.9 billion US dollars (2.6 billion euros) - more than three times the legal exports from Syria. According to the Economist, the value of all drugs confiscated from Syria was $ 3.4 billion. The magazine cites research by the consulting firm Center for Operational Analysis and Research (COAR).

 “It is literally the Syrian government that is exporting the drugs. It's not thatthey look the other way while the drug cartels do their thing. They are the drug cartel, "said the former US special envoy for Syria, Joel Rayburn, in the NYT interview. Some of the business people involved in the drug business also supported Assad's presidential candidacy in the election in May this year, for example through rallies and poster campaigns.

The drug business is indirectly an important pillar of Assad's stay in power. For Jihad Yazigi, editor of the Syria Report with a focus on the Syrian economy, Captagon is now Syria's most important source of foreign currency. However, this income would not benefit the state. Nothing will change in the economically dramatic situation for the population. Yazigi: "The income is largely invested in the accounts of smugglers and warlords." '

'My brother went to Syria, he was tortured and killed'

 

 'In November 2012, a doctor from South London made his way to Turkey to treat refugees, he then went onto treat those injured from a hospital bomb after crossing into Syria.

 After this, Dr Abbas Khan, from Streatham, was "never a free man again" according to chief coroner, Peter Thornton.

 On November 22, 2012, the 32-year-old father-of-two was captured by Syrian officials and his family reported him missing.

 Just over a year later on December 16, 2013, Dr Khan's family received the news of his death - it has been eight years since.

 The time in between has been pieced together by Dr Khan's mum, Fatima Khan, who visited Syria in hopes of locating her son, as well as witness statements of those imprisoned with Dr Khan.



 What is understood is that the British orthopaedic surgeon, who had worked at Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, was wrongly captured and placed in an underground cell.

 During this time, he was tortured in a prison in Damascus for eight months.

 His resilient mother, Fatima, had gone to Syria to search for him and managed to locate him in the summer of 2013 after visiting a number of embassies.

 Upon meeting him, she found he had burns on his feet, a missing fingernail and weighed just 32kg - conditions in the cell were horrific, with mice, faeces and cockroaches.

 He told his mum that he had been imprisoned on acts of terrorism for treating dying civilians.



 In December 2013, the Syrian régime claimed he would be freed - but just days before his release he was found dead in his cell, with officials claiming he hanged himself.

 Fatima was told her son had killed himself.

 In 2014, a jury at his inquest returned the verdict that he had in fact been unlawfully killed - with Dr Khan's family always maintaining that he was murdered in custody.

 “Dr Khan was deliberately and intentionally killed without any legal justification,” said the jury forewoman.

 The same year, two Syrian prisoners came forward and said Dr Khan was "killed for the brutality he witnessed".

 The British Foreign Office also agrees that he was "in effect murdered" and just this month another witness came forward about the horrific treatment inside the Syrian prison.



 American medical aid worker Kevin Dawes was also detained just days after entering Syria in 2012, he spoke about what he suffered during his three and a half years in detention.

 Kevin met Dr Abbas Khan during his time there and said they were placed in adjacent cells.

 "We were able to speak to each other under the door. They would scald him with hot water and beat him. They did the same to me," he said.

 When Dr Khan's mum Fatima came to see him, he told her to alert the US embassy about Kevin's imprisonment.

 That is when his treatment improved, "I owe Abbas a lot," he said.

 But eight years since his death, there are still questions unanswered and justice is yet to be served.

 Although witness statements have been gathered and a case is being built, it's unclear whether the Syrian régime will ever be held accountable.

 But Dr Khan's sister, Sarah Khan, is hopeful.



 She said: "We've been collecting evidence the eight years, we're receiving new witness statements every few months from detainees who saw Abbas or those who have more details of his murder. We'll be submitting evidence to the Met. We're looking for a mechanism to be able to hold them accountable. There was a famous case recently in Germany which was successful, against a member of the Syrian régime guilty of torturing.

 Kevin Dawes statement is further proof of Abbas' incarceration in a military prison and his torture. We hope and pray for both Kevin and Abbas' family to receive the justice they deserve."

 Today is the eight year death anniversary of Dr Abbas Khan, and there are still thousands of foreigners unlawfully imprisoned in Syria.

 Sarah says: "Although eight years have passed, we feel no different in our want for justice. No family should have to go through what we have and unfortunately there are still hundreds imprisoned in Syria, being tortured and murdered. We will continue to search for evidence and witnesses to push our case. This isn't just justice for Abbas solely, if we succeed in bringing a case against a brutal régime and they are held accountable for their heinous crimes we will be protecting other humanitarian aid workers who put their lives at risk to save others." '

Displaced residents of Syria's Tal Rifaat yearn for home

 

  'Nearly a quarter of a million people displaced by the terrorist group PKK's Syrian offshoot YPG, who sought asylum near the border with Turkey, wait for the day to return to their beloved homes.

 Most of the civilians whose relatives were killed by the terrorist organization live in the opposition-controlled Azaz district in makeshift tents.

 Haj Ali Muhammed, one such person, said: "When the attacks occurred, we left our house and hid under the olive trees for about 10 days. We tried to migrate to a safe zone.

 "As a result of the firing, two of my sons lost their lives. I am looking after five orphans now."

 Longing for home, he said: "We will not leave our homes to the terrorist organization, we will definitely return ... Maybe I will not be able to go back, but we look at our village from the front line every day. I tell my grandchildren about our village and its stories. Even if I don't, my grandchildren will definitely return."

 Mostafa Ibrahim Akkas said that he took shelter with his family in Azaz after YPG/PKK attacks on their village, Meranaz, north of Tal Rifaat.

 The 46-year-old father said he lost one of his sons in a YPG/PKK attack.

 He said the terrorist group is trying to disunite Arabs and Kurds in the region.

 "We do not have a problem with the Kurds. The terrorist organization has no place in Syria. I want not only my village but all of Syria to be cleared of this terrorist organization," Akkas said.

 The terrorist organization, which captured Tal Rifaat in February 2016 with Russian air support, frequently attacks Turkish forces and opposition fighters – who provide security to civilian settlements in the Operation Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch regions.

 The attacks often target the northern Syrian regions of Azaz, Marea, al-Bab, Jarablus, Afrin, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain.'

They treated me like a criminal for speaking the truth

 

 Mohamed Ibrahim:

 'It was an ordinary Monday morning in Jordan when they came for me. At around 11:30am on 15 November, the doorbell rang. I wasn't expecting anyone, but to my surprise, three intelligence agents stood on my doorstep. Before I had a moment to process, they had taken me outside, and told me to remain silent.

 The Jordanian General Intelligence Service had come for me. They had come for me before, handed me over to the General Security who had interrogated me about my activities. They grilled me on my media appearances on several satellite TV channels, and my presence in several Clubhouse chatrooms, where I spoke out against the legitimisation of the Syrian régime and how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would economically benefit from the normalisation of Jordanian-Syrian relations.

 They treated me like a criminal, and the officers who arrested me beat me like an animal in front of my wife and young children. They verbally abused me and accused me of hiding my equipment, even though I had handed everything over, including my families' phones.

 They entered my house and quickly confiscated all my devices. My camera, my iPad, my phone and my laptop. Before I knew it, I was bundled into a car and driving off into the unknown.



 My crime? The intelligence services had come for me because I had spoken out about the much talked about Arab Pipeline. Its function is to help solve the energy crisis in Lebanon, and it would involve building a pipeline from Egypt, through Jordan and into Lebanon. The only obstacle standing in the way was the Syrian régime, as the pipe would have to run through Syria and be maintained by the régime. When Egypt and Jordan were excluded from the US' sanctions programme – known as the Caesar Act – which has rendered Assad's Syria a pariah state, it was decided the pipeline would go ahead.

 The officers threatened to hand me over to the Syrian régime where I would disappear into the black hole of the intelligence services, who would surely kill me for my work as a reporter. Being a Syrian journalist who seeks to speak the truth is a dangerous game, and you make enemies on all fronts; especially if you expose the ugly side of Assad's brutal dictatorship.

 I stayed in the detainees' transport section of the Public Security Directorate until the next day. They transferred me to the Directorate of Security of Zarqa Governorate, after which I was detained for a whole night until I was transferred to Azraq camp.



 One of the officers appeared to take pity me, and offered me a 'special summons', which read: "Mohamed Ibrahim is transferred to the fifth village in Azraq camp, with the guarantee that he will never leave." After that, I was taken to the security centre at the camp and tested for COVID-19. In the afternoon, when the results came back negative, I was transferred from the "Quarantine Department" to obtain papers for the camp, and I was sent to the "Fifth Village" in the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.

 I am there now, and the conditions are harsh. It is in the middle of a desert, which gets freezing at night, and welfare services are practically non-existent. I was given blankets, bedding, and some utensils, and a meal so foul I could barely eat it. I now buy my own food from the various stalls available around the area.

 We later received information from reporters working in Syria that a list had been compiled by the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate with the names of journalists and activists the régime had in its crosshairs. So, at the behest of al-Assad, the people on this list had been rounded up and arrested by the Jordanian state. Some were forced to suspend their work, and staff from publications like Syria Direct were deported.



 I have not yet been charged with any crime. It is impossible, as I have committed none. I have not committed any criminal offence or violated residency laws since I arrived in Jordan in 2015. I do not wish to make offensive statements, nor do I wish to break a single letter of Jordanian law.

 All I have done is my job as a journalist. I have exposed Russian propaganda about their activities in Southern Syria, written about Iranian-backed militias and their role in demographic changes in my home country, I have sought to tell the world about al-Assad's human rights abuses, and cautioned against warming relations with him. I condemned the exemptions made by the US administration to the infamous Caesar Act which allowed Arab states to strengthen ties with the Syrian régime.

 I stood up and spoke because I want to stop authorities normalising ties with a brutal régime, overseen by a ruthless dictator, who regularly kills and disappears my contemporaries in the journalistic field. I wanted to hold to account the Jordanian government for legitimising the atrocities committed by al-Assad. I have been locked up for it and threatened with being handed over to murderous intelligence services. I write this at great risk to my safety, as I have been forbidden from speaking out about my situation to western publications. Pray for me, pray for my colleagues and friends who bravely go out there every day to report the truth.'

In Syria’s Endless War Health Workers Are Targets

 

 Leonard Rubenstein:

 'In Syria where hospitals were subjected to airstrikes, missile attacks, and shelling more than 600 times. As a result of régime and Russian airstrikes in 2020 in Idlib, in the northwest, the World Health Organization estimated that over a four-week period, more than 133,000 medical outpatient consultations would not take place, 11,000 trauma patients would not receive treatment, and 1,500 major surgeries would not be performed as they normally would in the region. Attacks often force a realignment of priorities in health care as the need to try to save the lives of people with traumatic injuries catastrophically forced hospitals to reduce services for chronic illness and maternal and child care.

 The Arab Spring protests in Syria began with peaceful demands and hopes for democratic reform that had already migrated from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen. President Bashar al-Assad responded to the protests with ferocious repression by the notorious Mukharbat, the military intelligence agency that reports directly to the president, along with other security forces. They tortured teenage boys who scrawled anti-government graffiti on walls and shot and killed peaceful protesters. After some advisors urged Assad to be conciliatory, he went through the motions of meeting with reformers, but his strategy remained the use of lethal force against nonviolent protesters. Six months into the demonstrations, the UN reported that the régime had already killed three thousand demonstrators. By the end of 2011, the number killed reached five thousand. Many thousands more were arrested, many of them tortured to death.

 It quickly became apparent that protesters suffering gunshot wounds had to avoid hospitals. Régime snipers shot at the injured as they tried to enter civilian hospitals. If wounded people made it inside, security forces often beat patients in emergency rooms; intruded into surgical suites and intensive care units, where they ripped out IV and oxygen tubes and dis-connected ventilators; and forcibly removed and arrested patients from the facilities. They were often sent to military hospitals, notorious for their use of torture. In one reported case, doctors had to beg the security forces to allow them to close a patient’s abdominal cavity before he was taken away. Police demanded that hospital medical staff provide information on patients, sometimes beating nurses and doctors to get it. Many health workers fled, sometimes leaving hospitals with severely depleted staff. Pro-régime health workers, contemptuous of the protesters, often denied them treatment or joined in the abuses against patients.

 To respond to the needs for emergency care and surgery, doctors who were either opposed to the régime or appalled by the assaults on the wounded began clandestine efforts to provide care. It was a dangerous choice. The régime’s pervasive intelligence apparatus summoned health workers suspected of treating protesters for questioning at police stations or intelligence agency offices, where they risked arrest, detention, and torture. In the hidden clinics, care remained challenging, not just because of the need for secrecy but because of the difficulties and risks in obtaining equipment and supplies. The nation’s blood banks were run by the Ministry of Defense, so the makeshift clinics had to obtain blood on the black market. Even so, an underground medical network grew quickly.



 Dr. Tayseer Alkarim was one of the leaders of this effort. He was four years into a prestigious oncology internship when the demonstrations began. Like many young Syrians, he thought political change was essential and was now possible. He joined the nonviolent movement for Syrian democracy while participating in the medical response. His group, Doctors Coordinate of Damascus, was the largest of the medical relief organizations springing up in response to the crisis. Now living in Paris, Dr. Alkarim told me that he and his colleagues improvised surgical suites in doctors’ offices, clinics, and non-medical spaces, including homes. In some private hospitals and clinics, Doctors Coordinate of Damascus paid for services in cash and sought to protect sympathetic staff by not revealing the patient’s name. But at the major oncology center in Damascus where Dr. Alkarim was interning, the supervising physicians strongly identified with the régime and, he said, “were aggressive against all students who provided services to demonstrators.”

 The clandestine locations for medical care proved no match for Syria’s ubiquitous security services. In August 2011, one of Dr. Alkarim’s physician friends was captured by the régime and forced to reveal the names of medical colleagues offering care to the protesters. Word got back to Dr. Alkarim that he had been named. His wife immediately left Damascus for Turkey and he went underground, moving from house to house while still working as a physician and managing the work of other doctors and health care providers. Just before Christmas, however, after leaving a meeting of medical coordination groups, he was arrested, blindfolded, and put in a car, where he was beaten and kicked. Dr. Alkarim was among more than 250 doctors arrested early in the protests for treating wounded demonstrators, according to a local coordination committee.

 At the time in Syria, only the highest-ranked students got into medical school, but Dr. Alkarim’s membership in an elite profession offered no protection. On the contrary, interrogators told him he was a traitor to the nation. “You studied for free,” he was told, “and you stab us in the back.” The corruption that was endemic to the régime saved him, as a lawyer bribed a judge to secure his release on bail.



 To formalize the basis for his and others’ arrests, in 2012 the régime adopted a new law that defined terrorism as including any act to “disturb public security” by use of particular weapons or “by means of any tool that serves the same purpose.” Under that law, anyone who participated in demonstrations against the régime or provided medical services to protesters was deemed a terrorist, which had the effect of criminalizing all medical care in opposition areas. One of my own students at Johns Hopkins had been a victim of these same policies. Mohammad Darwish followed the path of both of his parents and began medical school in Syria well before the protests began. In March 2011, he was arrested. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was brought to what he later learned was a military airport.

 There he was forced onto his knees in a corridor and put in an excruciatingly painful kneeling position, where he remained on and off for four days. Periodically guards beat and kicked him. His captors denied him food and water for two days. His refusal [to name names] led interrogators to employ electrical shocks on his elbows and knees that he told me “were like an explosion in my body.” The pain was so intense that he “was not even able to scream.” It was difficult to breathe. “I smelled flesh burning.” Because of the beatings, he could barely walk and asked to see a doctor. When his request was finally granted, the doctor slapped him, saying something like, “Does that make you feel better?” When finally put into a tiny cell with eleven others, he felt lucky to be out of the corridor and away from the arbitrary beatings.

 Dr. Darwish learned from a cellmate that his medical student colleagues had been released and, along with his parents, were frantically looking for him. They had also started a campaign for his release, resulting in Amnesty International including him in its list of protesters whose release it sought. The campaign apparently succeeded, as after four weeks in detention Dr. Darwish was released, though not before the general in charge of the detainees showed Dr. Darwish his gun and said, “You will not be arrested again.” He remained [in Syria] until 2016 when a routine stop at a checkpoint almost led to his arrest. He knew he had to leave the country.



 In 2014, I traveled to Gaziantep, Turkey, to speak with 25 health workers who were based in opposition-controlled areas of northwest Syria to learn about their experiences trying to practice medicine while under assault. I had been invited by Dr. Zaher Sahloul, then-president of the Syrian American Medical Society, who I had gotten to know because of his advocacy to protect health workers and civilians in Syria.

 The 25 Syrian health workers with whom I spoke were mostly young, as by then the most experienced doctors opposed to the Assad régime had the resources to leave the country. Six of the men I interviewed (only a handful of women were at the training) had been arrested and tortured; others had narrowly escaped. Two were detained because they had participated in demonstrations, and another because he had carried a sign with the names of other doctors who had previously been arrested. Others were incarcerated because they had or were suspected of having worked in makeshift field hospitals to provide care to wounded protesters. A pharmacist who established first-aid clinics in Idlib was deemed to be a terrorist. The men were subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and terrifying threats. A thoracic surgeon (I did not record their names for security reasons) told me that after he was arrested in 2012, interrogators demanded to know whether he moonlighted from his public hospital job in one of the clandestine facilities. Their suspicions were correct, but he refused to admit to the truth, even under torture that included electric shock and forced standing for twenty hours. “They told me that if I didn’t admit to working in a field hospital, they would torture me more,” he said, “but I did not for fear they would kill me.” He felt fortunate that his supervisor at the public hospital protected him when questioned, and he was released. Another health worker arrested at a checkpoint reported similarly: “The most important thing was not to reveal my role in medical work.”



 “We are under great danger of being killed or injured any time,” the director of the Idlib Health Directorate, which coordinated services in opposition-held areas of the governate, told me during my trip to Gaziantep in 2014. “All the time and any time: in the morning, in the evening. You don’t know if you are going to wake up or not,” he said. He was speaking of the régime’s missile attacks on and bombing and shelling of hospitals. They began in August 2011, even before the pro-democracy movement had led to armed conflict. As the régime’s violence against protesters continued, groups began taking up arms against it. They were initially composed of individuals seeking political reform, but over time other groups, including jihadist organizations and the Islamic State, entered the conflict. Gulf countries, Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, the United States, and others provided weapons, funds, and in some cases military forces, pursuing their own objectives and increasing the lethality of the war. Syrian missiles, shelling, mortar fire, and bombings of hospitals soon become a barbaric routine in contested regions of the country.

 The Assad strategy was executed on a vast scale, never before seen. He attacked eight hospitals by the end of 2011, and ninety more in 2012. The World Health Organization reported at the end of 2012 that 78 percent of ambulances had been damaged and more than half were out of service. By fall 2013, an independent commission established by the UN Human Rights Council found that “deliberate targeting of hospitals” is “one of the most alarming features of the Syrian conflict.” In mid-2014, the World Health Organization reported that only 40 percent of public hospitals were fully functioning (and that included hospitals in régime areas, where hospitals were mostly intact).

 The Syrian military by then had added barrel bombs to its arsenal. These consisted of oil-drum-sized containers filled with explosives, bolts, and other metal objects, often dropped from helicopters hovering directly above the target. The blast force of this primitive but powerful weapon forced shrapnel deep into every area of the body, and often severed limbs. The régime used barrel bombs thirty times in attacks on hospitals by mid- 2014.

 The combination of war and the destruction of the health system caused a health crisis. Diseases that were once rare, including typhoid fever, measles, and leishmaniasis, reappeared. Chronic malnutrition became widespread. The use of explosives in civilian areas led to more than six hundred thousand people suffering traumatic injuries, a figure that would soon rise to more than a million, even as hospital capacity for surgery plummeted. To address the crisis, Syrians in opposition-controlled areas responded with purpose and alacrity. They set up ad hoc administrative structures to manage health care services. By 2014, these had evolved into directorates that, to a greater or lesser extent, coordinated services. Another indigenous Syrian organization, the Assistance Coordination Unit, with support of international and Syrian NGOs, created a Polio Control Task Force to organize a vaccination campaign in opposition-controlled areas in response to the outbreak. Although initially hindered by a lack of access to vaccines, the campaign managed to reach a million children in opposition-controlled areas, including places ISIS governed. Even so, tensions among directorates and other entities claiming responsibility to coordinate services added to the burdens afflicting health care.



 One of the most successful of the health directorates in organizing services was in the rural areas of the Idlib governate (the régime controlled the city of Idlib at the time). In Gaziantep, I spoke to its director about the challenges he and his colleagues faced. An orthopedist originally from Aleppo, he coordinated the work of thirty-eight hospitals, many of them field hospitals opened in schools, municipal buildings, houses, and even chicken coops. The once-several- thousand-member medical staff in the area had been reduced to 250 health workers to serve a population that was then of more than 2,000,000 people, 750,000 of whom had been displaced from other parts of Syria. Electricity for the facilities came only from generators, and fuel often ran short to support surgery for the thousands of traumatic injuries a month. Appropriate medical instruments were lacking. The entire directorate had no intensive care unit and insufficient numbers of incubators for high-risk newborns. Doctors told me that more babies were dying from complications from the increasing number of home births, as women feared either getting killed en route to hospitals or dying in an attack after arriving there.

 His most wrenching challenge, though, was coping with the regularity of air and missile strikes on hospitals in the governate. He told me that more than a third of the hospitals in the region had been attacked in the year before we spoke, some of them multiple times. He was present during two attacks, one of them inflicted on a new orthopedic center on the very day it was scheduled to open. “One of the staff was standing in the door of the orthopedic center, and he died that day,” he said. Months later, the same facility was attacked again, closed for a week while repairs were made, and then reopened. Transporting patients was also dangerous, he told me.

 But not really. The health workers, working long and exhausting shifts, coping with complex injuries and shortages of supplies, staff, and medication, and in constant danger, suffered a huge toll physically and psychologically. The crushing workload of too many injured people needing attention from too few staff led to tensions with their families because of low (or no) pay and exposure to violence. They also suffered what bio-ethicists call moral distress, where health providers know what the medically appropriate and ethical course of action is, but because of external or internal constraints cannot take it. “You are not doing what you should,” the orthopedist said. As a result, “we are demoralized and burned out.” He personally felt vulnerable because of his role in developing a health system outside government control. He never traveled alone anymore. Despite his accomplishments in organizing a functioning health system, the director told me, “I am thinking of leaving.” He did not. Remarkably, six years later, when Idlib became the epicenter of the conflict, he was still running the directorate, having built it into a large and sophisticated operation.



 In Aleppo, the Medical Council reported that its five main field hospitals treated more than seventy thousand people in 2013 and performed ten thousand surgeries. The complexity of the injuries and the shortages of staff and supplies added to the burdens. Clinicians’ emotions, as well as skills, were overwhelmed by the injuries they saw, especially those from barrel bombs. One doctor told me, “I have seen ruptured spleens and shrapnel the size of a human hand.” Another surgeon said, “I have never seen such injuries.” Still, another recalled his own sense of horror: “I saw a mother and daughter whose bodies were blown apart, but their hands were still clasped together.” The disruptions from the bombing, meanwhile, radically interfered with already difficult operations even when a hospital was able to keep functioning. One doctor told me that while he was operating on a patient, a barrel bomb hit the hospital, shattering windows, breaking doors, and ripping bricks off the façade. The generator needed for the operation stopped, but “twenty minutes later, we got the generator going and I returned to the operation.”

 Parts of Aleppo had no running water, many pharmacies had closed, and dialysis centers could only operate with dramatically restricted hours as there was only limited fuel for electricity. Only about two dozen general or orthopedic surgeons remained, and anesthesiologists and vascular surgeons were gone. Dentists often stepped in to learn surgery on the job. Armed groups in the area often added to the tension, pressure, and moral distress of hospital staff by demanding priority care for their troops, often threatening doctors and nurses with death if they didn’t get it. I found it hard to grasp how they persevered.



 Why were hospitals and doctors targeted? “In Syria,” the Idlib health director said, “the best students go to medical school, which then gives them a kind of social status. That status is what makes the régime concerned about them. And with the régime’s goal of destroying the areas that are not under its control, the doctors are targeted more than others.” Other Syrian doctors shared that view: as leaders in the community, they were singled out. No doubt there is truth in that explanation. There are other likely reasons for the régime’s repeated targeting of hospitals and doctors. The Human Rights Council’s independent commission on Syria identified one: that “the pattern of attacks indicates that Government forces deliberately targeted hospitals and medical units to gain military advantage by depriving anti-Government armed groups and their perceived supporters of medical assistance.” Without hospitals and doctors, people couldn’t survive the shelling and the bombing, and unending traumatic injuries. The destruction of hospitals and health services also was likely part of a strategy to demonstrate the futility of supporting opposition forces, to compel local populations to move and to demoralize armed groups seeking to try to maintain services in areas they controlled. These purposes were also reflected in the grotesque, persistent war crimes the régime committed to destroy the opposition and their supporters, including bombing and shelling markets, using “double-tap” tactics that targeted rescuers after an initial attack, employing chemical weapons, encircling highly populated areas that led to starvation, and detaining and likely torturing more than one hundred thousand people, thousands of them to death.

 In 2014, neither the doctors with whom I spoke, nor I, imagined then that the war, and the assaults on civilians and hospitals, would grind on for many years to come. In June 2017 I returned to Gaziantep, this time as part of a collaboration among Johns Hopkins, the Syrian American Medical Society, and the International Rescue Committee to help health workers respond to the impossible ethical challenges they faced in the extreme circumstances in which they had to work. By then Syria, with help from Russia, had launched more than 450 attacks on more than three hundred medical facilities and killed almost eight hundred medical personnel. In 2016 and 2017, they attacked ambulances more than 200 times, most using air-to-surface missiles or shelling. Almost 150 of these involved double-tap attacks. To increase their safety, Syrians had moved almost 100 field hospitals to basements, underground, and even into caves in the side of a mountain. Syria and Russia responded with “bunker-buster” bombs that could penetrate below the ground to reach fortified and underground hospitals.

 A physician told one of my colleagues on the project, “I am subjected to constant punishment and self-lashing continuously without interruption. I am actually doing humanitarian work and helping the wounded and saving the lives of people, but the situation continues. Every day someone dies—we cannot save lives because there is no possibility.” He tried to convey the unfathomable burden of the years of strain. “We have been living in this state for many years. Sometimes I think really, how do I eat, drink, and live, and think about the bombing and the people who died, with the sense that my mind will explode…When a wounded [person] dies and his family starts weeping on him in the hospital, I feel guilty, sometimes I feel that I killed him because I could not help.”



 Female health workers had to cope with additional pressures, such as needing accompaniment for travel in rural areas and prohibitions on touching a male patient, denial of equal salaries and appointment to senior positions, and lack of respect for their professionalism. One woman said that the prevailing attitude was that “female doctors do not know as much as male doctors.”

 The doctors had also been deeply affected by their fellow physicians’ experience in trying to cope with a chemical attack in April 2017 in the town of Khan Shaykhun in southern Idlib. Much of the medical effort proved futile. One doctor explained, “I think that medical providers barely saved one to two percent of the chemical attack victims. We have no prior training, medical staff, or equipment to deal with it. I believe that what we were able to provide was too little.” The chemical attacks demoralized the medical community even further. The surgeon who worked in a cave hospital said, “It had a big effect on creating a hopeless environment. We fear being victims of the attack and not finding anyone to rescue us.” Another surgeon, who had worked throughout the war, said the fear and, with it, loss of hope, reached new depths. Another doctor said, “Although we have a lot of experiences with bombs and other aerial weapons, we never had to stop working, thank God. We lost all hope when chemical weapons started being used we no longer felt safe in the cave.” Many felt abandoned. One said, “death has become normal to the rest of the world, no one is reacting.”



 In the spring of 2019, Russia and Syria began an assault on Idlib, the last holdout of opposition forces. In May alone, in one twelve-hour period, Russia bombed four hospitals. It employed bunker-busting bombs again. By the end of February 2020 almost a million people, many of them previously displaced, were forced out of their homes, 80 percent of them women and children. Hundreds of thousands of people were stuck in informal camps with little access to sanitation, shelter, schools, or health care. Some people living in the camps burned old clothes to gain some warmth.91 Health facilities had to suspend operations. Thirty-one of them relocated closer to the Turkish border. The pressures on remaining facilities, operating far beyond their capacity, led to mayhem.

 The atrocities in Syria were documented contemporaneously as in no previous conflict. In addition to testimonial evidence, international and Syrian NGOs, investigators from the media, and the UN and flight trackers relied on real-time video, satellite imagery, analysis of soil samples, apps for data collection, and even cockpit transmissions. Courageous Syrians smuggled out hundreds of thousands of photos of men tortured in Syrian detention facilities. The UN General Assembly established a special unit to collect evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity for possible prosecution.

 Global mechanisms had been established in the years before the war in Syria to address mass atrocities, including a “Responsibility to Protect,” to prevent or stop atrocities. The UN special adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, Edward Luck, said that the doctrine was an answer to the longstanding problem in which “the capable have stood by as the slaughter of civilians unfolded. They have looked for excuses not to act rather than for reasons to intervene.”

 Russia used its veto power at the Security Council to block attempts to compel the Syrian government to stop the assaults or face consequences if it did not. It repeatedly blocked referrals to the International Criminal Court. The most it allowed was cross-border humanitarian aid into Syria without the permission of the Syrian government, but it ended that commitment in 2020 even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Syria became such a toxic subject at the Security Council that some governments sought to avoid discussion of Syria altogether during debates on violence against health care in conflict. When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed a UN board of inquiry in 2019 to review breaches of a “no-strike” list in Idlib, its mandate precluded reaching conclusions on potential legal liability. The report it issued pulled punches. The board found that Syria and its allies struck hospitals on the list but declined to name the allies to which it referred, particularly Russia.

 The question remained whether the United States would mobilize allies to act outside the Security Council, but there was never sustained pressure on President Barack Obama to do so. Syria never became a cause for activists and students as Darfur had been, with rallies on the National Mall and “Save Darfur” signs outside churches and synagogues exhorting action. The administration faced few political demands to act beyond those from human rights and humanitarian groups, editorialists, and Syrian expatriate groups and their allies in Congress. Influential senators and others promoted “safe zone” or “no-fly” zones, patrolled by US airpower, to protect hospitals and other civilian facilities. without Security Council authorization. The Pentagon opposed it. By 2013, moreover, Obama had shown that he would not take any military action against Syria after Assad has crossed Obama’s “red line” against the use of chemical weapons. Two years later, former senior State Department officials and others urged President Obama to establish three zones to provide a safe place for civilians in northern Syria. When Donald Trump became president, he engaged in pinprick retaliation for more chemical weapons attacks but was indifferent to the continuing carnage.



 The governments that could have protected civilians from Assad issued futile condemnations but declined to act beyond imposing economic sanctions. At the end of 2019, Susan Rice, National Security Adviser under Obama, acknowledged that “the human costs of [Assad’s] slaughter stung our collective conscience” and that “the gap between our rhetorical policy and our actions constantly bedeviled U.S. policymaking.” She nevertheless excused nonintervention as “the right choice for the totality of U.S. interests.”

 As the conflict approached a decade in length, hospitals that survived were desperately short of fuel to run generators. Resources to address the COVID-19 pandemic were inadequate and living conditions for the dis- placed people promoted transmission. In March 2020, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a no-fly zone in the region. Her remarks amounted to whistling in the dark.

 On September 20, 2020, almost ten years after Dr. Mohammad Darwish was arrested and tortured in Syria, intelligence agents in the city of Homs arrested his mother, Basma Khaldy, an ob-gyn, for allegedly offering treatment to wounded demonstrators in 2011. She was later transferred to military intelligence headquarters in Damascus. With the help of connections and bribes, Dr. Khaldy was released on October 11, but intelligence agents continued their harassment, coming to her house to question her. After months, and more bribes to obtain a passport, she and her husband, also a doctor, were among the 70 percent of the country’s health workers who fled the country. More than nine hundred of the health workers who remained during the war had been killed.

 March 2021 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of pro-democracy protests that were greeted with brutality and led to war. By then, more than 3,300 health workers had been arrested, detained, or disappeared. On March 21, artillery shelling of a major surgical hospital in western Aleppo killed seven patients, among them a twelve-year-old boy, and injured fifteen others, including five medical staff. It went largely unnoticed in the international media.'

Assad in charge of a dismembered and decimated state

 

 'The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

 Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle to survive: the hunt for cash.

 All five were executives at Syria’s second-largest cellphone company, MTN Syria, according to individuals familiar with the episode. Their arrests were part of a ruthless campaign by the president to seize MTN’s assets, along with almost every other meaningful source of revenue in Syria’s shattered economy.

 MTN was ultimately brought to its knees four months ago after protracted pressure in which those arrests were followed by demands for multimillion-dollar payments, threats to revoke the company’s operating license and a dubious court ruling that put an Assad loyalist in charge of the company.

 The South Africa-based corporation announced in August that it was abandoning the Syrian market under conditions that its chief executive called “intolerable.” MTN’s cellphone towers are still working, its 6 million subscribers still paying their monthly bills.

 “But where that money is going, no one knows,” said a Syrian executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Honestly, no one knows.”

 Similar events have played out repeatedly over the past two years, as Assad and his financially strapped regime have raided or outright seized dozens of businesses, including foreign corporations and family enterprises that rode out Syria’s decade-long war in government-held territory, according to U.S. and other Western officials, as well as Syrians with firsthand knowledge of the regime’s actions. Neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian presidency responded to requests for comment.

 Companies that had survived the war have been raided by teams of regime “auditors” and agents, who scour their accounts for supposed tax and customs violations or other pretexts for hefty fines. Business leaders who stuck by Assad have been detained and pressured to cough up money to supposed charities that are widely seen as Assad slush funds.

 The moves are part of what one Dubai-based Syrian executive called a “mafia-style money grab.”

 The most brazen cases amount to corporate decapitations in which top executives are forced out under duress and replaced by Assad loyalists. Among them is a relative newcomer, Yasar Ibrahim, who in a two-year stretch has acquired control of MTN and other Assad-targeted companies.

 Even members of the Assad family have not been spared. Last year, Assad stripped his cousin Rami Makhlouf of companies and assets that had once been part of a massive portfolio estimated by Syria experts to be worth as much as $10 billion.

 The regime’s campaign to commandeer wealth has only intensified since then. U.S. officials and Syria experts said it has been driven by the intense financial pressure on a regime that has been bankrupted by war, daunting debts to Iran and Russia, a meltdown in neighboring Lebanon’s financial sector and continuing economic sanctions from the West.

 Assad needs the money, officials and experts said, to meet payroll for his military and security services, to buy fuel and food for the capital and other areas still under regime control, and to reward some Syrian elites who remained loyal to him through the war.



 After a decade of conflict, Assad is left in charge of a dismembered and decimated state where nearly half of Syria’s territory is beyond his government’s reach, entire towns lie in ruins and the currency has lost 85 percent of its value since the start of the war.

 “In an era of a shrinking economic pie, the fight for resources becomes even more ferocious,” said Robert Ford, who served as U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014. The climate of desperation “actually gives Assad even more leverage,” Ford said, because so few potential rivals have the wherewithal, financial or otherwise, “to contest Assad’s control.”

 Assad and his shrunken inner circle have found ways to cling to power and maintain aspects of their elite lifestyles, while much of the rest of the population faces a deepening humanitarian crisis.

 More than 90 percent of Syrians now live in poverty, according to the United Nations. Many of the country’s hospitals, schools and roads outside Damascus have been reduced to rubble. And drought has raised fears of famine, with humanitarian groups estimating that 12 million Syrians’ access to adequate food is at risk.

 The United Nations has estimated that rebuilding Syria will cost at least $250 billion. U.S. sanctions are already a major barrier to foreign investment, and the Biden administration has signaled they will remain in place until Assad agrees to substantial political reforms.

 The treatment of MTN and others may further undermine the prospects of any money flowing into Syria. “No sane and rational foreign investor would think of doing anything in Syria under the current operating environment,” said the executive who described the assault on MTN.



 The mafia-like elements of Assad’s strategy go beyond the seizures of companies.

 The Syrian régime has also become an alleged drug trafficker, accused by U.S. and Western officials of producing mass quantities of the amphetamine Captagon at facilities in loyalist areas along Syria’s coast. In 2020, European and Arab authorities seized shipments with an estimated street value of $3.4 billion — more than Syria’s annual budget — according to the Center for Operational Analysis and Research, a global risk and development consultancy.

 The régime is also accused of diverting tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid intended for impoverished Syrians.

 A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for instance, documented how the Assad government has pocketed more than half of every dollar brought into the country by aid organizations — charging what CSIS said were artificially inflated exchange rates for Syrian pounds that aid groups need to buy supplies and operate. The Syrian central bank diverted at least $100 million between 2019 and 2020, CSIS concluded, by accepting dollars from aid groups and returning Syrian currency at a fraction of its worth on the open market.

 Even before the war, Syria was widely perceived as a kleptocratic country in which the Assad family enriched itself by exploiting access to state-controlled assets and imposing parasitic partnerships on businesses.

 But that approach has been upended dramatically over the past two years, as Assad turned on formerly trusted insiders and abandoned any pretense of entrepreneurial partnership.

 Among the main targets has been the telecommunications industry, a singularly reliable source of revenue in a country where the poorest Syrians often carry cellphones even if they can’t count on reliable access to electricity or clean water.



 The régime began targeting companies on the periphery of the industry as early as 2018, according to Syrians with direct knowledge of the matter.

 In one early case, a company that provided support services to the country’s main cellular carriers was told that its clients would sever their contracts unless the smaller firm’s owners relinquished control.

 The company had more than 200 employees and revenue of several million dollars each year, according to a Syrian executive knowledgeable about the episode. Senior managers were encouraged to stay, and the business continued to operate largely as it had for years. But the company’s contracts were taken over by a new entity, Al-Burj Investment Company, the executive said. Al-Burj was controlled by Ibrahim, a financier and businessman who has gained favor with Assad in recent years. Ibrahim’s sister Nasreen was listed on corporate records as an Al-Burj executive, according to Syrian individuals familiar with the case.

 “We were hoping to be one day be part of the new Syria — to be part of the reconstruction and that this régime would not be there,” said an executive with knowledge of the takeover. “We no longer have any hope of going back.” The executive spoke on the condition of anonymity and asked that the name of the company not be published, saying that relatives and employees still in Syria remain vulnerable.

 The Assad régime soon shifted its attention to larger corporations that dominate the cellphone business.

 MTN had entered the market in 2008 with the acquisition of a company that had been started by a Lebanese businessman, Najib Mikati, who is now Lebanon’s prime minister. MTN invested heavily and came to hold roughly 45 percent of the Syrian cellphone market.

 Then, in late 2019, the company was informed by Syria’s main telecommunications regulatory agency that the 20-year license it had acquired just four years earlier would be canceled without an additional payment of $40 million. When MTN balked, régime pressure intensified, a second Syrian executive said.

 In May of last year, the company executives were arrested. These five top employees, including four men and one woman, were detained in simultaneous 2 a.m. raids and taken to a prison run by the internal security branch of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate, according to Syrians familiar with the case. A sixth employee was taken into custody the next day from his office in Damascus.

 The employees included MTN’s senior managers in Syria, but not its chief executive, who had left the country earlier in the year. The arrested executives were interrogated for nearly three weeks and faced threats to themselves and their families before being released, Syrian individuals said.

 “The main purpose was not to get information,” one person familiar with the case said. “It was a message being sent.”

 MTN began negotiating to sell its 75 percent stake in its Syria operation to a company called TeleInvest that was controlled by Ibrahim, the Assad associate, who had previously acquired the other 25 percent from a Saudi investor.

 But the deal with TeleInvest was delayed by concerns about Ibrahim’s ability to secure the money for the transaction, an executive said, and then collapsed when the United States imposed sanctions on Ibrahim in mid-2020. The Treasury Department referred to Ibrahim as Assad’s “henchman” and said that “using his networks across the Middle East and beyond, Ibrahim has cut corrupt deals that enrich Assad, while Syrians are dying from a lack of food and medicine.”

 MTN, which operates in 21 countries across Africa and the Middle East, worried that it might face U.S. financial penalties if it were caught doing business with the sanctioned Syrian, the executive said.

 When the deal fell through, Assad’s government moved to seize control of MTN through different tactics. In a lawsuit, Syria’s regulatory agency accused MTN of violating the terms of its license, tax evasion and other charges, and secured a ruling that put the company under control of a court-appointed guardian.

 The company disputed the allegations and challenged the ruling in court in Syria but lost that case. An MTN spokesman in South Africa said that the company “declines to comment any further on this issue.”

 The court then handed that role as guardian to TeleInvest, the same Ibrahim-controlled company that had tried and failed to negotiate a purchase of MTN.

 The South African company surrendered, bowing out of a business that had generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenue before the war, though earnings had contracted significantly during the conflict. The company still had 6 million subscribers when chief executive Ralph Mupita declared in August that MTN would “abandon” its business in Syria after having “lost control of the operations through what we feel was an unjust action.”



 While still stalking MTN, Assad orchestrated a more audacious takedown within his own family.

 Rami Makhlouf is the scion of an elite clan that Assad’s father — Syria’s longtime leader Hafez al-Assad — married into. With virtual free rein over the country’s economy for nearly two decades, Makhlouf used his influence to build an empire reputed to be worth billions, though it was widely suspected that he was holding much of that wealth on behalf of his cousin, the president.

 Makhlouf’s most valuable asset was Syriatel, the dominant mobile phone carrier in the country, though he also held lucrative stakes in Syria’s oil, banking and real estate sectors.

 Makhlouf’s exploitation of state power was so conspicuous that he was put under U.S. sanctions years before the civil war broke out, accused of having “manipulated the Syrian judicial system and used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals.” The U.S. Treasury Department in 2008 called Makhlouf “one of the primary centers of corruption in Syria.”

 Last year, Assad began publicly denouncing his profligate cousin in terms similar to those used by the U.S. Treasury.

 The attacks on Makhlouf came as Assad sought to deflect blame for a deepening crisis in Syria’s already ravaged economy. A collapse in neighboring Lebanon’s baking system left thousands of Syrians unable to access their savings and sent the country’s currency into a tailspin.

 Syrians also saw other reasons for Makhlouf’s reckoning. His family’s flaunting of its wealth — his sons have a habit of posing on Instagram with exotic cars — triggered outrage among impoverished Syrians.

 There has also been speculation among Syrian expatriates that Assad’s wife, Asma, who was born in London and worked as a banker with J.P. Morgan before their marriage in 2000, was asserting more control of the régime’s finances to secure a fortune for the first family’s three children.

 The dismembering of Makhlouf’s empire began in 2019, when Asma was put in charge of the assets of Al-Bustan Association, a Makhlouf-run charity that claimed to support families of régime loyalists killed in the war but became known as a conduit for funding for private militias. In 2017, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Al-Bustan for “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to support and augment Syrian military forces.” The organization was at the center of “a vast private network of militias and security-linked institutions,” the Treasury Department said.

 Asma, who survived breast cancer in 2019, also heads the Syria Trust for Development, which serves as a major conduit for U.N. assistance money flowing into the country and as a key source of patronage for the Assad family, giving it a powerful say over who receives aid.

 Several Syrian businessmen who fled the war said that Asma was behind the push to seize revenue from the cellphone industry in Syria and sideline Makhlouf, in part to ensure that her own eldest son, Hafez, is in a strong position to someday succeed his father.

 Last year, Makhlouf suffered the biggest blow yet when he was stripped of his shares of Syriatel, one of the most profitable businesses in the country, with control of 55 percent of Syria’s cellphone market.

 A humiliated Makhlouf resorted to pleading for mercy from his cousin in a series of jarring videos posted on Facebook. He said Syriatel regularly turned over half its revenue to the state and could not pay more without facing collapse. He expressed disbelief that security agencies he once wielded against business rivals were now raiding his own companies. He pleaded with Assad to end his financial “suffering” and blamed a “cadre” close to the president for “framing me as the one who is wrong.”

 In his most recent video, in July, Makhlouf ranted against the new owners of Syriatel, accusing them of “thievery.” He obliquely compared himself to Moses, suggesting that he would deliver Syria’s poor from the predations of the “war profiteers” who had taken over his former company. Makhlouf did not respond to a request for further comment.



 The videos marked a staggering fall for Makhlouf, while creating an unexpected opening in the position he had long held as Assad’s money man.

 Several ambitious Syrians auditioned for the job. Among them was Samer Foz, who had grown rich during the war by stockpiling properties including the former Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, which has continued making money by catering to leaders of aid organizations and U.N. delegations that visit the country.

 Foz, 48, had inherited a holding company from his father that billed itself in online brochures as an “international group operating in a wide range of industries,” from pharmaceutical supplies to a Lebanese television station. Foz has homes in Dubai and Latakia, Syria, according to the U.S. government, and is a Syrian national who also holds citizenship in Turkey and the Caribbean nation Saint Kitts and Nevis.

 Syrians with knowledge of Foz’s operations said he amassed much of his wealth by exploiting his network of connections and ingratiating himself with Assad during the Syrian conflict.

 Foz used a private jet to crisscross the Persian Gulf region, soliciting funds for Assad from donors, according to Syrians familiar with his activities. He also delivered ultimatums to wealthy Syrians who had fled the conflict that they could either sell to him the companies they had left behind or risk losing everything.

 Secret financial records unearthed as part of the Pandora Papers, which were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with The Washington Post, show that Foz used the offshore financial system to set up shell companies outside Syria during the war to hold a yacht, a jet and other assets. In 2017, documents show, Foz changed the name of one of his offshore companies from “Foz Holdings” to “Skyy Capital Limited,” possibly to avoid attracting attention.

 But his rising profile and involvement in a brazen real estate scheme put in him the crosshairs of the U.S. Treasury Department. He was the lead private investor in a real estate project called Marota City, which involved the planned construction of luxury high-rises in a Damascus suburb on expropriated land where the régime had bulldozed thousands of homes previously occupied by Syrians who fled the conflict.

 The contract was valued at $312 million, according to the Treasury Department, and appeared aimed at attracting money from Persian Gulf investors. But the project foundered after Syrian backers faced a flurry of U.S. sanctions. Among them was Foz, whom the Treasury Department accused of having “leveraged the atrocities of the Syrian conflict into a profit-generating enterprise.” Foz did not respond to a request for comment.



 Foz has since been eclipsed by another Assad-backed upstart.

 Yasar Ibrahim, a 38-year-old businessman who was virtually unknown before the war, has presided over the shakedowns of major Syrian firms from an office in Assad’s presidential complex, according to Syrian executives and experts.

 There are conflicting theories about what accounts for Ibrahim’s rising influence. An expert on Syria’s economy noted that Ibrahim’s father had served as a consultant to Hafez al-Assad, and that the Ibrahim family is from the same minority Alawite sect as the ruling family. “He is Alawite, and they are loyal to Bashar, not Asma,” who was raised Sunni, the expert said.

 But others believe that Asma is Ibrahim’s main patron, in part because of her reported close ties with two of Ibrahim’s sisters. “He gained Assad’s trust by that connection,” said Joel Rayburn, who until last year served as special envoy for Syria at the State Department. “Little by little, he took on the moneyman duties.”

 Either way, Ibrahim now sits at the center of a remarkable constellation of companies in oil, food, construction and other sectors. One, Hokoul SAL Offshore, was hit with U.S. sanctions in 2019 and described by the Treasury Department as a “front company” for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

 Most importantly, Ibrahim has amassed near-monopoly power over Syria’s cellphone market, having displaced the family owners of the support services company, pried control of Syriatel away from Assad’s cousin and seized the reins of MTN after the company’s capitulation in August.

 The régime has portrayed these forays as a crackdown on corruption, a ploy that has won some public support, experts said. In that vein, Ibrahim has cast himself as a benefactor to targeted companies, even as he displaces their owners and commandeers their cash.

 A Syrian executive said Ibrahim had summoned senior employees of the seized telecommunications support company to his office, trying to win their loyalties by saying he had intervened to rid the firm of corrupt bosses. He sought to convince the employees that he was “a good guy, a gentle guy, and a patriot,” the executive said. In reality, the executive said, “Yasar is the bully,” an enforcer for Assad.

 Ibrahim and his sisters, Rana and Nasreen, were also put under U.S. sanctions last year for their allegedly predatory roles in the régime. The designations forced them to remove their names from the boards of directors of Syriatel and other companies. But their standing with Assad appears undiminished. Earlier this fall, Foz was forced to hand over his stake in the former Four Seasons hotel to Ibrahim, according to Syrians with knowledge of the matter.

 “The Ibrahims are by far the rising stars — it’s boggling how far their influence is spreading,” said Karam Shaar, a consultant on Syria and research director at the Operations and Policy Center in Turkey. Even so, Shaar said Ibrahim’s standing is as precarious as that of any of his predecessors. The Assads “use people like him as pawns, as fronts for the égime,” Shaar said. “If you get too strong, you will be chopped and replaced by someone else.”



 Syria today faces a “humanitarian catastrophe [that] is now among the largest in the world,” according to a senior U.S. official. The vast majority of the population lives on less than $1.90 a day and 6.2 million are listed as “internally displaced” by the United Nations, meaning they remain in Syria but were forced from their homes by a conflict in which Assad used poison gas and barrel bombs against his own people.

 In recent months, there have been growing signs that other Middle East leaders who once worked toward Assad’s ouster are resigned to his survival. But U.S. officials and Syria experts said the prospects for postwar recovery in Syria remain distant. The Biden administration has cautioned countries across the Middle East not to aid Assad financially or otherwise. And while Russia and Iran helped rescue Assad militarily when he seemed most at risk of losing the war, neither country has signaled any willingness to cover the projected cost of Syria’s rebuilding.

 Meanwhile, life for ordinary Syrians continues to deteriorate. Soaring prices put all but the most basic foods beyond the reach of ordinary people. In Damascus, lines for fuel stretch for blocks on end from the early morning hours till late at night, residents say. Blackouts are common.

 “We have deadly poverty, high prices, people cannot pay their rent,” said Salwa, a Damascus resident who asked that her full name not be used. “Everyone wants to leave, she said. “People would give anything to leave the country.”

 The shakedowns have padded régime accounts, with the Finance Ministry claiming that government revenue had tripled during the first nine months of this year. But Assad may be undermining the country’s longer-term prospects, said Shaar, the consultant. “He thinks you can coerce businessmen to do what he wants, but that’s not how economies work,” he said. “They will run away.”

 The country has indeed seen an exodus of business owners — possibly thousands of them, according to Syrian media reports. Many are taking what remains of their capital and expertise to Egypt and other Arab countries.

 Assad, however, remains ensconced in an upscale neighborhood of Damascus, a city largely unscathed by the conflict. Elites who have profited from the war continue to dine out and drink in bars and restaurants.

 Even the Makhloufs appear to be clinging to aspects of their privileged lifestyle. Rami Makhlouf continues to live at his villa in a suburb of the city. His son, Ali, surfaced on social media in October in Beverly Hills behind the wheel of a $300,000 Ferrari.'