Syria's Catastrophe Upon Catastrophe

 

 Yassin al-Haj Saleh:

 'In the first few days after the earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and northwestern Syria in early February, only vehicles carrying the dead bodies of Syrian refugees crossed the Turkish border into Syria—not aid and equipment to rescue people from the rubble of collapsed buildings, not vitally needed medical supplies, not temporary shelters to protect the frightened and injured from the extreme cold. These were naturally the most crucial days for search-and-rescue efforts, but it was left to the understaffed and underequipped teams of volunteer first responders in the Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, to try to save lives in a region home to some 4.6 million people, 2.9 million of them displaced from other parts of Syria. The White Helmets rescued nearly 3,000 people, but how many more would they have been able to save if they had received any international help in those critical first days?

 With the earthquake a month ago, Syria was in the news again, briefly. The international community—if one really exists—has for years passively dealt with the Syrian crisis as if it were a natural disaster, and it didn't change course when a real one struck. Three days after the earthquake, the United Nations said that a convoy of aid had finally crossed the Turkish border to the most affected area in northwestern Syria, giving the impression that this came as a response to the earthquake. That was a cowardly lie. The convoy, with food and other subsistence, was one of the few sent regularly by the U.N. from Turkey into northwestern Syria through a single border crossing, but it had been delayed because of the earthquake. It took three more days before Martin Griffiths, the U.N.'s aid chief, admitted, in a tweet: "We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn't arrived." It was unforgivably late. People whose homes collapsed over their heads and might have been alive under the rubble died while the U.N.'s top official for humanitarian assistance was wringing his hands.



 This catastrophe would not have happened were it not for the rest of the world normalizing death in Syria for so many years. State-centered international organizations like the U.N. have legitimized governments even when they are genocidal ones like President Bashar al-Assad's. His régime, which has been destroying homes and killing Syrians with barrel bombs and cluster munitions for years with the help of its Russian and Iranian supporters, is also the only channel through which these same people can get humanitarian aid. Earthquakes do not recognize national borders, but the U.N. does.

 Assad's corrupt and criminal régime, which has been responsible of more than 90 percent of civilian deaths in Syria since 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, has at times received more than 90 percent of aid deliveries from the U.N. and many countries—most of which it funneled to régime-held territory, or seized for itself. In some areas of Syria, like rebel-held Idlib in the northwest, "only 1 percent of the aid went through to besieged areas" during many years of the war, according to Carsten Wieland, a German academic and former diplomat who worked with three U.N. special envoys for Syria, and the author of Syria and the Neutrality Trap. As Wieland writes in his book, "delivering aid cross line—i.e. from government-held territories to opposition territories—was frequently blocked by régime-backed authorities who had no interest in helping foster resilience in the areas they bombed."



 As if the earthquake were the perfect chance for a public relations campaign, many Arab régimes—the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, maybe Saudi Arabia soon—are now normalizing their relationships with Assad under the pretext of humanitarianism. Yet the truth lies elsewhere. The common ground between these régimes is securitization of politics and enmity toward democracy and popular representation. With Assad's Syria now a paradise of unaccountability, indeed of crime, these other Arab régimes enjoy more liberty in dealing with their own indignant citizens. In a way, Assad has shown his fellow autocrats how to exterminate any popular threats.

 Meanwhile, in neighboring Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party, the AKP, have adopted the toxic and racist consensus of scapegoating Syrian refugees, with their eyes on June's elections. Normalizing with Assad's régime has been sold as a step toward returning the millions of refugees in Turkey to Syria, as well as a solution to the security threat represented by the Kurdish YPG forces in northern Syria, historically the Syrian branch of the PKK in Turkey.

 There is a pattern of using catastrophes in Syria for PR campaigns. Assad's chemical massacre in Ghouta in August 2013 proved to be a very good one, with the U.S. and Russia engineering a deal to disarm the régime of its chemical weapons, as a price for not punishing it for its breach of international law and killing 1,466 of its own people, nearly a quarter of them children. The disarmament, it turned out, was a cheap farce—the régime used chemical weapons several time after the deal, as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons proved in a recent report. In effect, the deal was a license to Assad to go on murdering en masse.

 Erasing the boundaries between crime and politics is characteristic of Syria under more than a half century of Assad family rule. Those 53 years are more than half of Syria's entire history as a modern polity. Today, March 8, 2023, marks the 60th anniversary of Ba'ath Party rule in the country, with the military coup that brought it to power (Hafez al-Assad would seize power in his own coup a few years later). Only around 4 or 5 percent of Syrians today are over the age of 60, which means that almost everybody in the country has only known a one-party system, a state of exception—and mostly under delinquent family rule with a mafioso constitution.



 This is what many people do not understand, especially U.N. officials: Syria is not a state, not even a corrupt brutal dictatorship. It is a family mafia, ruling trough thuggery and massacres. Assad did not declare any national mourning for the victims of Syria's earthquake; Erdogan announced a week of mourning in Turkey.

 Many Syrians remember that when Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, 40 days of national mourning were declared. There were seven days of national mourning when Bassel al-Assad, the eldest brother of Bashar and the first to be groomed as their father's heir, died in a car accident in Damascus in 1994. One can easily conclude that ordinary Syrian lives are unmournable, or as Judith Butler would have it, not "equally grievable" like the lives of the Assads.

 This is one of the essential facts of Syria's history for more than half a century, during which the country was reduced from a republic to a dynastic monarchy, more absolute and far more brutal than the monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, or in Jordan and Morocco. Syrians also remember that in June 1980, a day after an attempt on Hafez al-Assad's life, his brother, Rifa'at, sent a commando team to Tadmur prison, near ancient Palmyra, led by his son-in-law, and they killed all the Islamist prisoners there, between 500 and 1,000 at that time.

 What hinders many people from making sense of the situation in Syria is that it really is unbelievable. The level of suffering transcends human measure in scale, in duration and in intensity. This is what Hannah Arendt called the "shock of reality" and "the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are." It is unbelievable that more than 600,000 people have been killed since 2011, close to 15,000 tortured to death, more than 100,000 forcibly disappeared, 7 million made refugees in other countries—and now 90 percent of the population left in Syria is under the poverty line. It is unbelievable that the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity are still in power after all they have done, and that governments are now normalizing with them. It is unbelievable that Assad himself appeared happy and smiling in Aleppo when he finally visited the wreckage there, four days after the earthquake.'

The Political Origins of Syria’s Cholera Outbreak

 

 'Targeting civilians and their vital infrastructure, restricting their access to food and water, and producing mass violence were no longer exceptional war crimes, but brutal daily realities in Syria, as the state’s counterrevolutionary war waged against the population starting in 2011 has particularly featured the strategic weaponization of health.

 The intentional use of health as a weapon of war has not only prevented Syrians from seeking appropriate care for injuries, but also exposed them to emerging and re-emerging diseases, ranging from polio and tuberculosis, to the latest bout of cholera. It has also weakened all infrastructural resilience and health or humanitarian responses to large-scale disasters, as we continue to witness thousands of lives being lost after the tragic February 6 earthquake due to overwhelmed local capacities and deadlocked aid responses, especially in Syria’s northwest, despite the best efforts of the Syria Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets.



 While the 11th year of conflict in the country has displayed relatively lower levels of armed violence, continued forced disappearances, airstrikes, bombings, and intermittent clashes on various frontlines remain a major source of insecurity. Other forms of insecurity also endanger the lives of millions of Syrians, as they struggle with pervasive poverty, protracted famine, and reduced access to various basic necessities. Amidst rampant fuel and food shortages, over 15.3 million Syrians are estimated to be in need of humanitarian aid in 2023, with over 90 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Additionally, the scarcity of access to clean drinking water leaves a large share of Syrians with no other choice than to rely on alternative untreated water sources, vectors of a wide range of water-borne diseases.

 As an infamous disease of poverty, cholera thrives in conflict-afflicted countries where access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation cannot be guaranteed. Cholera has permeated various governorates, regardless of territorial control. While the first cases were mainly concentrated in Aleppo, the wave of infections soon also overwhelmed northeastern and northwestern Syria, posing a particularly grave danger in the Idlib camps’ informal settlements, suffering from overcrowding, insanitation, and lack of running water.



 The Syrian régime deliberately cut off access to and bombed water sources, such as the Ain al-Fijeh spring in 2016 situated a few kilometers northwest of Damascus, when punishing populations. Other actors, mainly ISIS, also employed water as a weapon of war, by not only destroying pipes and sanitation plants, but also poisoning water sources and calculatingly flooding cities. As such, less than 50 percent of water and sanitation systems are currently functional nationwide. As main treatment facilities have come to a halt, over 70 percent of sewage is untreated waste.

 Just like water was used as a weapon to force the opposition into submission and regain control of territories, it is currently deployed as a political tool to coerce and capture loyalties through politicized reconstruction, excluding those opposed to the régime. While one of the main reconciliation promises extended by the Syrian régime was to reinstate public social services in formerly rebel-held territories, the state only confiscated and co-opted the public facilities established by the disbanded opposition councils, including field hospitals and water infrastructure, but in a politicized manner, conditioning access to these services on political allegiance.



 Similarly to water, health has also been used as an instrument and target of violence. The Syrian state’s violence was distinctly characterized by the systematic targeting of health infrastructure. From the very early days of the revolution, most state-hospitals were militarily subverted as government forces stationed inside to capture incoming patients, or used them as a military base for snipers to fire from, as has been the case for the national hospital in Deraa. Over time, such focus on hospitals as political spaces evolved into full scale airstrikes, bombings, shelling, shootings, and artillery attacks penetrating the vicinity of health facilities, with over 600 attacks conducted between 2011 and early 2022. The Syrian régime and allied forces bear the responsibility of more than 90 percent of these attacks, which have intensified after Russia’s involvement in 2015, bolstering the air and ground campaign aimed at suppressing opposing political and military forces. The persecution, torture, and killing of health personnel, coupled with their enrolment to conduct medicalized killings and torture, as exemplified by the trial of the Syrian doctor Alaa M. for crimes against humanity, have further contributed to exhausting the country’s health capacities. The remains of this fragmented health governance architecture operate in secluded silos, unable and unwilling to communicate key data points to trace and contain outbreaks.



 During the COVID-19 outbreak, under-reporting was prevalent, owing to a lack of preparedness, testing capacities, but also of political will. The Syrian régime’s strategy today echoes similar lines of political reasoning, as the government fears demonstrating weakness through its inability to provide basic social services to a struggling population. This would undermine the state-propagated narrative presenting Syria as safe for return.

 With cholera cases spreading to Lebanon, and given the precedent set by the global response to COVID-19, the régime also fears facing stringent measures that would further reduce the mobility flows of people and goods. Yet, not only is the state misrepresenting the real toll of the disease, deep public distrust also prevents many in régime-held territory from seeking healthcare due to fear from persecution in infiltrated healthcare facilities, leading to greater disconnect between official public health figures and the reality on the ground.

 Yet, not only is the régime failing to contain the outbreak in the territories it holds, it is also actively repressing efforts to contain it in areas that fall outside of its control. Given the destruction wrought by the weaponization of water and health, rebel-held areas in northwest Syria rely on humanitarian aid. Continued cross-border humanitarian aid delivery rests on the renewal of the United Nations Security Council’s authorization every six months, which the Syrian government has previously attempted and successfully managed, to restrict, by closing off the Bab al-Salam, al-Ramtha, and al-Yarubiyah crossing points. Under the constant threat of Russia’s possible veto, failure to renew access to the remaining Bab al-Hawa access point could deprive the region from essentials needed to contain the cholera outbreak, including treatment, hygiene kits, and chlorine tablets.



 The Syrian ministry of health has received 2 million cholera vaccines from the UN in November 2022 for its exclusive benefit, with cholera vaccination coverage currently predominantly concentrated in areas under its political control. Similarly, the so-far limited international aid received by Syria, whether sent via bilateral or multilateral canals operated by organizations such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, has been channeled into government-held areas. This leaves little possible oversight to ensure it is directed indeed toward relief efforts and not diverted for other purposes, while also further isolating the northwest whose situation remains dire.

 As such, concentrating aid in Damascus allows the Assad régime to continue politicizing aid by selectively providing medical and humanitarian aid to areas it wants to reward loyalty in, while withdrawing it from those deemed to be opposing it.

 Any long-term solution will be contingent upon serious changes in the political and socioeconomic context, ones that hold the current Syrian régime accountable for its long series of crimes against humanity and provide an opportunity for Syrians to rebuild a country where freedom and democracy are inalienable rights.'

Idlib is under siege

 

 Gregory Waters:

' “Idlib is under siege” — this is the common sentiment shared with me by both local leaders and residents alike. The dual earthquakes on Feb. 6 not only rocked the physical foundations of the cities in Syria’s last opposition-held region, it cracked the social foundation of trust Syrians had with the international aid community. “The U.N. was built 75 years ago to respond to crises around the world,” the rebel leader of Idlib and head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, tells me. “They have experience with this, so why were they not able to send anyone to save our people from the rubble?” As the critical first week passed and no help arrived, urgency turned to anger and desperation. “The U.N. failed us in the first phase — rescuing those still alive under their houses. We hope they will not fail us in the next phase of rebuilding,” says Jolani.

Twelve years of war and limited international assistance have left Idlib’s institutions weak and unable to cope with the sudden crisis. “We already didn’t have enough doctors and specialists or specialized equipment,” says Dr. Husain Bazar, the minister of health of Idlib’s Salvation Government. “Most of the material support we were receiving ended a year ago, probably because of the war in Ukraine. Now it is needed more than ever,” he tells me. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 families have suddenly found themselves living in tent camps, extremely vulnerable to diseases like cholera and measles, unsure if they’ll have a home again. There have been many grassroots development projects in recent years by Syrian businessmen and regional NGOs, creating new housing blocks for both poor and middle-class displaced families. Yet all of these efforts have been set back years by the tens of thousands of newly displaced families and thousands of destroyed or damaged buildings. Rebuilding now demands international help.

The U.N. and the broader international community point to HTS and Jolani as the main reason for their lack of involvement in Idlib over the years. Jolani carries with him heavy historical baggage as a former member of the Islamic State in Iraq — ISIS’s predecessor — and the founder of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syria affiliate before reforming as HTS. Despite breaking from al-Qaeda in late 2016 and fighting and dismantling an al-Qaeda and ISIS insurgency in Idlib in the years since, Jolani and HTS are still legally considered by the West as part of the global al-Qaeda network. This designation and its legal consequences have stymied much of the more robust, long-term infrastructure aid needed to rebuild Idlib. February’s earthquakes have underscored the inherent weakness of this static, inflexible policy: When disaster struck, there were only weak international mechanisms in place to facilitate a quick response.

The Syrian régime and its allies in the United Nations were quick to take advantage of the crisis, calling for all aid to northwest Syria to be directed through Damascus via the infamous “cross-line” mechanism in which a few U.N. trucks transit between régime and rebel-held territory every few months. It is well proven by now that the régime steals a substantial portion of all U.N. aid that enters Damascus, and often limits the type and quantity of aid allowed cross-line. After the earthquake, HTS and the residents of northwest Syria begged for the type of immediate, robust assistance that could only be provided via their Turkish border crossing — a crossing through which the vast majority of U.N. aid has flowed for years. But the U.N. stalled and quickly diverted attention from its own failures to HTS’s blocking of cross-line aid. HTS claims it has not refused to allow cross-line aid, but has only insisted that it should occur when substantial U.N. earthquake assistance begins to enter from Turkey — in line with U.N. Resolution 2672. The U.N. claims this rhetoric demonstrates the group’s politicization of aid, obfuscating the fact that cross-line has always, explicitly, been political.

Since 2021, the U.N. has agreed to send a purely symbolic amount of aid to northwest Syria via Damascus, and in return Russia agrees to allow thousands of trucks in through Turkey every six months. These deals are the culmination of seven years of politicization and weaponization of humanitarian aid, during which Russia routinely used its Security Council veto to whittle down the number of crossings the U.N. could use to bring aid to anti-Assad Syrians. However, international law experts and human rights organizations have for months highlighted the U.N.’s legal duty to “conduct temporary humanitarian relief operations to bring life-saving supplies to a people in extreme need, when no alternatives exist.” The U.N. chose instead to empower Damascus.

In lieu of international support, the people of Idlib took it upon themselves to first rescue, then recover, re-house, and finally begin rebuilding the tens of thousands of lives uprooted by this disaster. Idlib’s Salvation Government and its Ministry of Development and Humanitarian Affairs (MDHA) have taken on the role of coordinating aid distribution among the around 100 local NGOs that operate in the province, facilitating rescue and aid work between NGOs, the White Helmets, and other ministries, ensuring all communities, no matter how small or remote, are serviced. Local contractors, HTS, and even Turkish military units deployed along the frontline have donated heavy machinery for recovery efforts.

But rebuilding all that has been destroyed is another matter. The scale of the destruction and its random nature have left residents comparing the quake to a months-long régime offensive occurring in a single night. Aftershocks and the third, smaller earthquake on Feb. 20 have left residents wracked with fear and paranoia that another major quake is imminent. It is a brutal nightmare three years into a ceasefire that had begun to breathe new life into the region. Idlib is not helpless, its residents have demonstrated their resiliency for over a decade of war and siege, but they cannot rebuild from the layers of crises that have built up over 12 years on their own.'

The silence after the earthquake in NW Syria is deafening

 

 Rizik Al-Abi:

 'Syrian television channels have recently been showing images of president Bashar al-Assad visiting buildings damaged in last week’s earthquakes that have killed more than 40,000 people.

 In the wake of a natural disaster, such demonstrations of concern and empathy with those affected are commonplace among politicians worldwide.

 Yet some argue that the images on Syria’s screens are not what they seem and amount to disinformation.

 Moufida Anker, a Syrian journalist and activist, said: “It is terrifying what is happening. The dictator appeared to be laughing. The most terrible thing is that he deceived the international organisations that came to support him and deluded them that the buildings in front of them were destroyed by the earthquake. Many of them were destroyed earlier by his own planes; we have proof of that with the photos archived earlier.”

 Assad’s critics say he has found in this disaster an opportunity to break the international isolation that was imposed more than 10 years ago.

 The earthquake has increased the oppression of Syrians in the northwest of the country that has been going on since 2011. The UN says that since the uprising, the Assad régime has killed more than 400,000 Syrian citizens for reasons related to freedom of opinion, expression, and demonstration, and hundreds of thousands are in prison for the same reason.

 Syrians living in the northwest of the country, on the border with Turkey, and the hardest hit by the earthquake are being ignored and silenced.

 From the first moment of the earthquake, and despite the horror of what it left behind, the Assad régime has practised a media blackout regarding news from the northwest of the country. Assad’s loyal channels do not talk about the number of victims there, which far exceeded the number of victims in the areas controlled by the Syrian government.

 The media and social media in Assad-controlled areas are subject to great censorship by the Syrian government security forces, as civilians in these areas are afraid of showing any sympathy for the people in the northwest. We recently documented an arrest carried out by the régime’s security forces of a citizen from Homs who called his relatives in the north of the country to check on their health after the earthquake.

 The aid donations that have flowed into the country from the UN, people in Arab nations and other countries have not been reaching those in the northwest, with many saying much of the aid has been diverted into areas controlled by the Syrian government as well as being illegally sold in Syria’s markets.

 Dozens of photos have been circulated by activists in Damascus and Aleppo that appear to show influential members of the Assad régime to be involved. It is little wonder that Assad is now being called “the aid thief”.

 The first earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, hit Syria at 4.17am on Monday 6 February. A second quake, measuring 7.5, hit nine hours later.

 According to official statistics published by the volunteer Syrian Civil Defence organisation, or White Helmets as they are better known, 2,274 civilians died in north-western Syria as a result of the quakes.

 In the week since the disaster, the United Nations has admitted that it has been unable to provide help to the Syrians in the northwest of the country.

 The Idlib region and the area around Aleppo are home to more than five million Syrians, most of whom have been displaced after years of attacks from the Syrian army, whose mission is supposedly to protect Syrians.

 Martin Griffiths, the UN’s under-secretary-general and the emergency relief coordinator, said: “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”

 This prompted Syrian activist and journalist Muhammad Tata to set up a fund to collect donations from the afflicted to the United Nations, an ironic action intended to criticise the international body’s inability to meet the urgent calls for aid.

 Many destroyed buildings have been adorned with the official flag of the United Nations, and signs placed on the rubble saying “We died…Thank you for letdown.”

 After the quake, it took many days before the Syrian government approved the opening of crossings from Turkey to facilitate the entry of aid, and this at a time when the Assad régime did not even recognise the earthquake victims in Idlib and area around Aleppo – the official government death toll left out those in areas not controlled by the government. When al-Salam and al-Rahi crossings were finally opened, Assad was accused of doing so for political gain.

 “They who died survived, and they who survived died” is a phrase now used by hundreds of Syrians on social media, amid wholesale grief and mourning for loved ones and friends and international impotence.'

Where was the UN?

 

 Raed al-Saleh:

 'It’s been an entire week since the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria — seven days of horror and heartache on a scale we did not experience even in the darkest hours of the Syrian conflict.

 Our team of White Helmets volunteer rescue workers in northwest Syria have been working around the clock night and day, pulling survivors from the rubble and searching for signs of life — with virtually no help from the outside world.

 Our hope of finding survivors has faded. As we pull more dead bodies from the rubble, my heart breaks for every soul that could have been saved and was needlessly lost because we did not get the help we needed in time.

 We are the only organization here with the equipment and training to undertake heavy search and rescue. The volunteers have been doing the impossible, and I am humbled by their selflessness and dedication.

 While Martin Griffiths, the UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, hailed the search and rescue efforts after the earthquake as “unparalleled in history,” in northwest Syria we were left to do what we could with limited existing equipment and manpower. Let me be clear: The White Helmets received no support from the United Nations during the most critical moments of the rescue operations, and even now we have no promise of assistance to restore our operational capacity and help the recovery and rehabilitation efforts.



 On Sunday, I met with Griffiths, who acknowledged that the UN had let down people in northwest Syria by failing to act promptly. “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Griffiths said on Twitter on Sunday.

 After the earthquake struck, it was four days before any international aid started to trickle into northwest Syria via the single border crossing authorized for UN aid deliveries at Bab al-Hawa. The first delivery of aid carrying tents, shelter materials and basic relief items had been scheduled before the earthquake. There was nothing to help with our rescue efforts.

 The UN’s failure to respond quickly to this catastrophe is shameful. When I asked the UN why help had failed to arrive in time, the answer I received was bureaucracy. In the face of one of the deadliest catastrophes to strike the world in years, it seems the UN’s hands were tied by red tape.

 Griffiths told Sky News over the weekend that the UN was asking the Security Council to authorize aid access through two additional border crossings, a misguided approach that wasted precious time. Legal analysts and scholars have argued against it, and humanitarian organizations say the need is too high for aid entry to be politicized.

 The United Nations needs to do better. Something is clearly broken if the very system that was set up to protect and save human lives during an emergency leaves children to die under the rubble as precious minutes and hours pass.

 The UN announced on Monday that the Bashar al-Assad régime had agreed to open two more crossing points into northwest Syria for three months for humanitarian aid. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said opening these crossing points “will allow more aid to go in, faster.”



 Assad’s intervention is a cynical move that has come far too late. The UN’s insistence on waiting for the Syrian régime’s permission — the very régime that has bombed, gassed, starved, forcibly displaced and imprisoned millions of Syrians — is unforgivable. It is no secret that the Syrian régime is not a credible partner in addressing the suffering of all Syrians in a neutral and impartial manner.

 For years the Assad régime with the help of its ally Russia has weaponized humanitarian aid and sought to tighten access to humanitarian aid for civilians in the northwest despite the fact that even before the earthquake, roughly 4.5 million people were facing a desperate humanitarian crisis.

 Time and again Russia has used its veto at the Security Council to shut border crossings, reducing the routes for delivery of cross-border aid via Turkey to a single entry. Opening additional crossings on a temporary basis is not enough — more cross-border routes were already sorely needed.

 We cannot forgive the United Nations for once again turning its back on Syrian civilians in their hour of need.



 As we searched through the rubble of thousands of buildings, it was the local affected communities that helped us most: lending their cars and heavy vehicles to the response, helping to dig, and donating fuel they could have used to keep themselves warm.

 They are struggling to deal with the new challenges this earthquake has brought. Syrians need and deserve more support. Our local organizations and local response deserve recognition and funding.

 There is no more time to waste. The UN secretary-general must have the vision and leadership to put himself on the right side of history. The Security Council and the régime should not be used to restrict humanitarian aid access in the future. Guterres should immediately ensure that the United Nations and international aid agencies have unhindered humanitarian access to ensure more lives are not lost.'

Lifting sanctions on Syria won’t help earthquake victims

 Wa'el Alzayat:

 'Following the devastating series of earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and northwest Syria on Monday, the Syrian régime has re-energized its calls for lifting sanctions leveled against it. Syrian government spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban told Sky News that if the United States and the European Union lift sanctions, then “the Syrian people will be able to take care of their country.” A number of well-meaning civil society and religious groups have also made similar pleas.

 The U.S. State Department has thus far rightly dismissed such calls. But as the full scope of the destruction and human suffering comes into focus, expect these calls to intensify. Here’s why the United States should hold its ground.



 The U.S. government has imposed a number of sanctions against the Syrian régime going back to 1979 because of its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism and its occupation of Lebanon. Following President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters demanding change in 2011, the U.S. government imposed additional targeted sanctions to deprive the régime of the resources it needs to continue its violence against civilians. This included blocking property of régime officials and prohibiting the importation by the United States of Syrian oil.

 In 2019, Congress passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, named after a Syrian military defector who exposed widespread abuse and killings in Assad’s jails. The act placed further sanctions on Syrian government industries and foreign entities that provided financial or material support to the régime.

 The motivation behind these sanctions, especially those post-2011, is straightforward: to limit Assad’s ability to finance his military and militias who have been implicated in some of the worst atrocities of this century. As his main international backers, the governments of Iran and Russia have tried hard to shift the blame for Syria’s economic woes from Assad’s role in destroying the country to the sanctions. While sanctions have certainly contributed to stunting government expenditures and the Syrian lira’s depreciation, they have had no significant bearing on the delivery of humanitarian assistance.



 In fact, since the start of the conflict, the main conduit for humanitarian assistance into Syria, the United Nations, has primarily worked in régime-held areas. Despite documented corruption within the U.N. procurement process and Syrian régime influence over where aid is delivered in Syria, the United States remains the leading donor, providing nearly $16 billion throughout Syria and the region. Most of this assistance is actually spent in régime-controlled areas, because the régime prohibits most of this aid from ever reaching opposition-held communities.

 During my time at the State Department, the régime was besieging up to 18 opposition-held towns, where it denied them access to food or medicine. U.N. and Red Cross convoys were regularly turned back, and those that were allowed to pass through were stripped of medical and other lifesaving content. Over the course of the conflict, Russia has managed to hold the Security Council hostage by forcing it to agree to a single border crossing from Turkey into northern Syria to deliver humanitarian aid into opposition-held communities. It is these same communities that now lie under rubble and desperately need international assistance.

 According to Syrian rescue organization the White Helmets, there has been no communication from the United Nations, and only one U.N. aid convoy has been sent to the affected areas since the earthquakes struck. They report that hundreds of families are still trapped under collapsed buildings with cold temperatures closing the window for survival.



 Rather than misplaced calls to lift sanctions on a régime that displaced millions of people now affected by the earthquake, what is needed is immediate and direct outreach and assistance to Syrians in the northwestern corner of the country, as well as a surge of specialized teams and lifesaving aid across all available border crossings from Turkey.

 Assad and his régime cannot possibly be relied upon to help the very people they have been trying to exterminate for more than a decade. Only the good people of the world can.'

Syria resembles its revolution: isolated and abandoned

 

  Muhammad Hussein:

 'Only four days after the quakes did six truckloads of aid finally enter the north-western province of Idlib, with even that consisting of the usual – although still much-needed – products like blankets, clothes and food items rather than those necessary for directly assisting victims of the earthquake and able to assist in the lifting of rubble.

 Even more importantly, there have been no rescue groups, organisations, or teams from other nations to help the affected victims in north-west and northern Syria, leaving the local population to deal with operations on their own.

 One local in north-west Syria, Saleh Androun, said: "We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between the régime's militias, and Turkiye's own emergency, and internal political rivalry which makes it even harder to pass aid through."

 Another local activist, Abbas, said that if a more developed country like Turkiye is "in need for all hands on deck and all the international help that is offered…what will be the case for the people of Idlib and northern liberated Syria which is now running its revolution onto the twelfth year?"

 Despite the people of Idlib being more used to disaster management and responsiveness than most due to their experiences, he said, "we are [still] in need of resources like finance, aid and specialists in the disaster management field, as well as heavy equipment to cut through the metal and dig through the rubble. Medical personnel and medical aid are crucial at a time like this."



 It is only the White Helmets, otherwise officially known as Syrian Civil Defence, that is using its experience in rescue operations gained throughout the ongoing war to lead the earthquake rescue operations, as well as locally-based NGOs and charities such as Molham Team which are providing relief and aid to victims and their families.

 Meanwhile, a number of friendly states like Russia, Pakistan, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, and China have offered to assist areas under Syrian régime control, but that aid is being provided to opposition-held areas. That reality has given birth to a myriad of misinformation by the Assad régime and its supporters, giving them ample material to justify an international normalisation of ties with Damascus.

 The widespread and usual explanation behind the lack of aid to opposition-held territories is that Western sanctions are preventing the Syrian government from receiving international aid and distributing it to these areas. That is easily debunked by the fact that aid is not officially subject to sanctions, seen in the international aid so far provided to régime-controlled territories by the aforementioned countries.

 Even more essentially, there is a real and widespread lack of trust in the Assad régime's ability – or willingness – to properly and equally distribute aid to all areas, with many warning that it will not be sent to opposition-held areas. That was the case over the past decade of conflict in the country, which is a primary reason separate cross-border aid corridors were established, and is unlikely to be different this time.

 As Androun told me, "everyone has already seen where UNHCR aid goes, only to Assad's army", referring to the régime's rampant corruption in diverting international aid and its siphoning off of funds.

 Moreover, the régime continued to bomb the north-western civilian areas a day after the earthquake struck, giving no consideration for the catastrophe and loss of life. How can such a player be trusted as the arbiter of international assistance and aid?

 Already, social media users are reporting of the régime and its forces' refusal to allow aid to flow north to the opposition-held areas, with one Twitter user stating that "an experimental attempt to bring 50 blankets from northern Hama to the countryside of Idlib was prevented by the Syrian army."



 Another user reported how the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) – the supposedly impartial charity directly under the influence of the régime – dropped off a significant amount of food, water and blankets in a government-held area, "only for the régime to load it up into trucks and take it away after a photo-op. Residents later received 4 eggs and a loaf of bread per family."

 Still other footage and clips show SARC purportedly stealing the aid and refusing to distribute it, with other pictures and screenshots apparently showing items diverted from aid now being sold in shops.

 "I have seen with my own eyes during the liberation of parts of Idlib the régime soldiers had stockpiled UN aid as their military stocks," Abbas told me. "Imagine sacks of rice with UN logo, for the displaced, being used for their [Syrian] military. So I do not trust Damascus to be truthful in delivering any aid" to opposition-held areas.

 He stressed his stance that sanctions against the Assad régime must be kept in place. "For these sanctions are put on the régime and criminal individuals who had betrayed our country. These sanctions had no direct economical [impact on] the people of Syria. Lifting sanctions means these criminals' aggression against people will intensify."

 Citing the continued régime attacks against the northern territories, one of which reportedly took place yesterday, he said: "If there is an ounce of humanitarian feeling, they would cease these attacks while its people are dealing with natural disaster." Abbas was not surprised at Damascus and its supporters' calls for lifting the sanctions, saying it "tries to utilise every opportunity to make an excuse to lift" them.



 One of the clearest solutions many are now urging for, and which would hardly need any significant brainstorming to enact, is the reopening of the other border crossings previously used for transporting aid into opposition-held Syria before vetoes by UN Security Council member Russia shut them down a few years ago. This, however, only took place three days after the tragedy that struck the region.

 Ineptitude by the UN is, to many, a key factor in this crisis, and it is unclear whether that is intentional or not. As Ammar al-Samo, a White Helmets member and volunteer, told Middle East Monitor: "The UN response to Syria was delayed and not only insufficient, but there was no response. It seems that the UN is trying to delay aid and to work under bureaucracy, and to put pressure on the international community to deliver aid to the Syrian régime." He clarified that "We don't know if that was the intent, but that is the message."

 Al-Samo emphasised that the Syrian people and his group blames the UN "for not providing any support to the Syrian people. We are left alone under these circumstances, as if we are in the Middle Ages."

 While "taking the Syrian people hostage", he said, the Assad régime is making use of the ongoing situation by "exploiting the global sympathy and solidarity to manage the aid, to skip towards normalisation, to bypass justice and accountability."

 Citing the government's blatant use of a picture showing rescue operations in northwest Syria to display a false narrative of its own response, al-Samo stated that its "intent is clear: to use this catastrophe to get political benefit."

 Four days after the earthquake struck Turkiye and Syria, only one of them has received the attention it so needed. The other is left isolated, neglected and abandoned – much like its 12-year-long revolution – by its dictator and his régime on one side and by the international community presided over by the UN on the other side.

 Northwest Syria, the thousands of human lives affected there, and the many buried under rubble in a new humanitarian crisis, require a coordinated response and rescue teams just like Turkiye is getting. The fact that it is not is testament to an inept and devalued United Nations, continued corruption by the Assad régime, and perhaps simply a world that no longer cares.

 "I keep running my finger down the list of countries that has sent help and rescue workers to Turkiye, checking and rechecking if there is a country that will be willing to come towards us, at least after helping Turkiye," Abbas lamented.'

Extracts from My House In Damascus by Diana Darke

 

 'Where to look first? The sheer beauty of the old stones, their soft hues of golden limestone, the deep pinkish red of the local marble, the fierce contrast with the harsh black volcanic basalt that ran in alternating bands round the courtyard walls. It took me by surprise. The elaborate stone patterns continued in the courtyard floor, gently polished by the wear of centuries.'
[p5]

 'A ray of hope appeared. Weirdly, unexpectedly, something changed in Damascus. By late afternoon on Friday, 13 April [2012], the entire mood of the city had lifted. In the morning the news had carried footage from the régime's TV station claiming there had been an explosion at the ruling Ba'ath Party Headquarters, but when we went to look there was nothing to be seen. Sound bombs became a common scare tactic, or bombs without a detonator, like the one the régime sent through the walls of the Saydnaya Monastery to frighten the nuns. When nothing exploded this time in Damascus or Aleppo, we all hoped there might be a sea change. Where were all these armed groups, the jihadis and al-Qaeda elements the media loved to talk about? At that stage my friends dismissed their existence in any serious numbers. This had been true, back in April 2012.

But it was just a pause, tragically brief, and the opportunity was squandered. The régime broke off from its killing spree, looked up to take stock of the world's reaction, realised there was no unified voice, and continued in its single-minded aim - to crush the opposition. It was on the way to self-destruction. Addicted to power, oblivious to all pleas to change course, in denial about the size and nature of the problem, it would almost certainly have to reach its own personal rock-bottom, like all addicts, before things could improve.'
[pp11-13]

 ' "Death is easier than a Syrian prison,said activists who survived it. "Inside prison you wish for death a million times." '
[p16]

 'Before giving Quneitra back in a UN-brokered disengagement agreement in 1974, the Israelis razed the place to the ground. Since then it has been kept exactly as it was. Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president Bashar and creator of the Assad régime and Syria as it is today, took the decision not to rebuild Quneitra, as an example of what the Israelis were capable of. How ironic that towns all across Syria would, in the course of the uprising against him and his régime, be similarly flattened, this time by his own armed forces.'
[p17]

‘Homs was 30 per cent Christian, though most of them were not just in this quarter, but fully integrated throughout the districts of the city. In the revolution, during the famous fight for Baba Amr where the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin was killed, Christians fought alongside Muslims, Tariq later told me, united in their struggle against the régime. In the souk, both Christians and Muslims owned shops side by side and had done for centuries. This social cohesion is the main reason why Homs, Syria’s third city, rose up as one against the régime early on, unlike Damascus and Aleppo.’
[p114]

 'After two and a half centuries of Mamluk rule, internal order collapsed. When the Ottomans defeated them in 1516, the populations of Syria (and Egypt) welcomed their new Turkish masters. Will a similar point be reached eventually in the current revolution, when the weary protagonists fighting a seemingly endless war of attrition against each other have finally had enough and submit to a new rule of law imposed from the outside? Or is there any chance they could find an internal solution - for Syrians by Syrians?'
[p203]



 'Maybe Bashar has no strategy except a misguided attempt to return to the corrupt old Syria his father created, so that the régime will have to disintegrate internally, dragging the country down with it, and Bashar will end up being slaughtered in the sewer Gadhafi-style, before conditions are right for a total change. No one knows how long any of that will take, while thousands more lose their lives and millions flee as refugees to avoid a similar fate.'
[p204]



 'Today, elders from the Sunni Muslim community of Homs hold meetings to discuss how to deal with the pregnancies that resulted from the rape of 1,200 girls by Alawi shabiha thugs after the district of Baba Amr fell.'
[p207]

 'The bottom line was that the régime had brought the trouble on itself through its zulm, its "oppression" of the people. Abu Ashraf was eloquent on the subject: Kul muwatin ya'raf Maher yaksur al-balad, wa Makhlouf yastaghil al-balad: "Every citizen knows that Maher [al-Assad, Bashar's brother] is breaking the country, and [Rami] Makhlouf [Bashar's cousin] is exploiting the country.'
[p219]



 'I stepped into the coutyard with its riot of colour - the wisteria, the bougainvillea, the myrtle, the lemon tree, the vine ascending to the roof terrace - it was always magnificent.'
[p220]



 'At any one time, 80 per cent of Assad's army is confined to barracks. Without its army, this régime would be finished, and they know it. Most of them - at least 70 per cent - are Sunni conscripts, and they are not allowed out because the régime knows most of them would not return. So their commanding officers - who are mainly Alawis - keep them locked up in their military camps, with no mobile phones, no land lines, no access to anything other than the Syrian state TV Channels. So lots of them still believe the régime mantra that they are fighting armed terrorist gangs who threaten the security of the Syrian nation.'
[pp229-230]



 ‘Marwan told me how he no longer carries a medical kit with bandages in his car. “If they stop you and find medical kit and bandages in your car,” he said, “they will accuse you of helping demonstrators and arrest you. We have to be very careful.” Most shocking of all was what he went on to tell me about the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC). He had applied for and got a job as project manager, after many stages of testing and interviews. When he started work, he was horrified to discover his work colleagues were useless, all of them at their desks purely on the strength of their connections – wasta again. He was even more horrified when he was put in charge of a project that turned out to be selling blood and organs to unnamed third parties. He complained to his boss, saying he could not sign papers agreeing to this. “But you must,” said his boss, “You are the only one here who knows how to run these projects. None of the others know anything.” Marwan refused, and quit, though his boss continued to phone him for weeks after, offering him more money and bribes.’
[pp251-252]



 ‘Drastic action is needed in Syria. It was needed three years ago when only Turkey had the appetite, calling for international intervention to create a no-fly zone and safe haven on Syrian soil along the border. But the West, bruised by failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, had no interest in involvement. Let them kill each other; it’s so far away and nothing to do with us.’
[p259]

'It Can't Get Any Worse.' The Agony of Syria's Earthquake

 

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 'Syrians wanted to be known for their contributions to civilization, as they were in ancient times. Syria is part of the Fertile Crescent where agriculture began, where the first cities were built, where the first states developed. The first alphabet, Ugaritic, originated in Syria. The country produced Roman emperors and, under the Umayyad dynasty, became the first center of a new "Islamic world." When Syrians achieved their independence from France in the mid-20th century, they hoped their modern accomplishments would echo the old. As a diverse, cultured, hardworking people who valued education, and who tended to excel in business when abroad, they had good reason to hope this would be the case.

 But like so many post-colonial states lacking strong institutions, modern Syria soon fell into a cycle of military coups and counter-coups, ending with the Baathist dictatorship that has tortured and plundered the country and its people since 1963—and under the Assad family since 1970, first Hafez al-Assad and, starting in 2000, his son Bashar. In 2011, Syrians rose up in revolution against the Assad régime, and would have liked then to be recognized for their revolution's successes. For years, they resisted the régime's most extreme oppression and, even under the bombs, managed to build hundreds of democratic local councils. They also managed to avoid falling into sectarian civil war, despite the provocations. Sunni and Alawi villages didn't attack each other. The sectarian massacres had to be organized from on high, first by Assad, then by ISIS, the régime's dark protégé.

 But the Assad régime was rescued by Russian and Iranian imperialists, and by the West's appeasement of these imperialists. The democratic Syrian revolution was defeated by force of arms. Worse, it was "orphaned," to use Yassin al-Haj Saleh's term. Beyond Syria, it was ignored or misrepresented, particularly in the West, by the Kremlin's leftist and rightist useful idiots and a wider public prepared to believe the worst of a mainly Arab and mainly Muslim people.

 So now Syrians have become known internationally not for their history, nor their revolution, but for the extremity of their suffering. Their pains under dictatorship were bad enough—culminating initially in the 1982 Hama massacre when at least 20,000 were murdered under Hafez al-Assad, but then multiplied after 2011 when the full force of local, regional and international counterrevolution was deployed against them.



 From the start, pro-régime thugs smashed limbs and crushed skulls. Their mantra was: "Assad, or we burn the country." Tens of thousands of unarmed young protesters were rounded up and then slowly tortured to death in the régime's gulag. When this didn't suppress people's urge for freedom, the régime launched military assaults on civilian neighborhoods, and organized a campaign of mass rape against communities deemed disloyal. Throughout the summer of 2012, the régime organized a series of sectarian massacres, in Houla, al-Qubeir, Tremseh and elsewhere, in which the throats of Sunni women and children were slit. This accompanied a steady military escalation, as the régime gradually worked out that the so-called international community would let it get away with any type of murder, from mortars and barrel bombs to grad and scud missiles. Then chlorine gas, then sarin gas, up to and beyond the atrocity of August 2013 when 1,500 people were choked and convulsed to death in just a few hours in the Damascus suburbs. Next came the starvation sieges, often perpetrated by Iran-backed militias. By now, the régime and its allies had understood that they couldn't make the people kneel, so they decided to remove them instead. The scorched-earth strategy meant the bombing of bakeries, schools and hospitals, the burning of crops and the shooting of livestock. Millions were driven from their homes.

 "It can't get any worse," Syrians used to say. And then it got worse, again and again, until the phrase became a sad joke. ISIS imposed its reign of terror over a third of the country. The international war against ISIS, led by the United States, destroyed the jihadist state as well as the cities it had occupied, but left Assad—the root cause of ISIS in Syria—alone. Russia's direct military intervention added cluster bombs, thermite and "bunker busters" to the list of weaponry used against Syrian civilians. Russian aerial bombardment and Iranian-backed infantry recaptured liberated cities for Assad, most notably Aleppo, or what was left of it.

 Syria was divided into sections, each occupied by a different foreign power. The country became a battlefield for regional wars, between Turkey and the PKK, between Israel and Iran. By now, more than half of the population was forcibly displaced. Within Syria, they lived in tented camps that flooded and froze in the winter. Abroad, they drowned on boats crossing the Mediterranean, or suffocated in the backs of trucks entering Europe, and became the target of racist demagogues from Turkey to the United States.



 The situation kept on getting worse. Even as the Assad régime earned billions from the illegal production and export of the amphetamine Captagon and other narcotics, the economy in régime-held areas collapsed so dramatically that hospitals and schools were closed for lack of electricity. Over 90 percent of Syrians now live below the poverty line, ravaged by diseases such as Covid-19 and cholera.

 Could it get any worse? Yes, it could. This winter, a blizzard hit the north, where millions of Syrians had been displaced. The people in tents froze in the snow and mud. And then came the earthquake, which made those in tents seem like the lucky ones.

 In Turkey, the destruction is much greater than it might have been as a result of corruption—for years construction companies have bribed their way out of obeying the building regulations necessary in an earthquake zone. In northern Syria, building regulations were an irrelevant luxury in the first place, when the priority was to house the huge numbers of displaced as quickly as possible. Years of Assad and Russian bombing—which continued even in the hours after Monday's colossal earthquake—had in any case weakened the foundations of thousands of buildings.

 The earth shook at four in the morning when people were asleep in bed. Entire towns have been erased, entire families wiped out. As I write, thousands of Syrians are dying of their wounds, and of hypothermia, crushed in the rubble. They are dying not only because of a natural disaster but also because of the unnatural indifference of an ill-named "international community" that has appeased Assad, Russia and Iran for far too long. The whole world suffers from this appeasement. Had Russia and Iran not been appeased in Syria, they wouldn't have been in a position to rain death on Ukrainians today. But none suffer so much as Syrians.

 Assad and Russia close crossings through which aid might be delivered to the liberated areas. For years, the régime has diverted international aid to its loyalists, and even to its military. Foreign states, even those that now send military aid to Ukraine, continue to bow to Russian dictates in Syria. So while Turkey is today welcoming rescue teams from dozens of countries, the liberated areas of Syria are not. Syrians, as usual, are on their own. Which means that almost all of those in the rubble will die.



 Is this, at last, the lowest point? Can we now at last say that the situation can't get any worse? No Syrian would dare say so. Still, we must try to find whatever hope we can.

 I am reminded of the chapter of the Quran called "The Earthquake," part of which reads (in Tarif Khalidi's translation):

 That Day, mankind will come out in scattered throngs,

 To be shown their rights and wrongs.

 Whoso has done an atom's worth of good shall see it;

 Whoso has done an atom's worth of evil shall see it.

 There is a sense that this string of catastrophes is a test of some sort. Religious people will readily believe that earthly torments are a test of faith, with reward or punishment stored up in the life to come. I'm not a religious person, but I do think the revolution and war have tested Syrians and non-Syrians alike. Some have been prompted by the events to ever higher standards of morality, while others have given way to their most sadistic impulses. Some have tended to cooperation with their neighbors, while others have worshipped authoritarian leaders and ideologies. Syrians like Razan Zeitouneh, Omar Aziz and Raed Fares (all of them murdered since 2011) provide the world with models, if the world wants to look. And there are very many Syrian survivors spread around the globe for whom freedom, dignity and social justice have become as necessary as bread and water. Other groups that have suffered disproportionately, such as African Americans or European Jews, have had a disproportionate creative cultural impact on the world. Free Syrians will too. In this respect, their suffering is their strength.

 But none of that justifies their suffering, or excuses the crimes committed against them. No rationalization justifies the horror experienced by a single torture victim or a single child crushed in the ruins of his makeshift home. God help the suffering Syrian people.'

My family left Syria – I’ve gone back to build hospitals

 

 'I’ll never forget the day I treated dozens of severely burnt people – mostly children – in distress.

 It was 2013 and I was visiting one of the field hospitals I’d helped build in northwestern Syria when an incendiary bomb was dropped on a school, injuring and killing tens of people – mostly children.

 The makeshift ambulances herding streams of patients wailing in agony felt like they’d never stop coming.

 The hospital wasn’t properly equipped to fully treat them all, so my colleague Dr Saleyha Ahsan and I did the best we could – administering pain relief, bandaging burns and resuscitating where necessary.

 It was an event captured by the BBC Panorama team and later aired in the documentary Saving Syria’s Children. That day is etched on my heart, mind and soul.

 It’s just one of the reasons why I do the work I do as a doctor originally from Syria, but now living in the UK.



 As a child, I recall playing with my Barbies and Sindys and insisting on performing life-saving surgery on them.

 For me, growing up in Syria was the smell of jasmine on my grandmother’s balcony, biting into the most delicious falafel sandwich and walking around the winding cobbled streets of old Damascus.

 It was running joyfully around the fields my family farmed in rural Homs – where my dad was raised – with dozens of my cousins.

 This was my childhood until I was 12, when my family and I moved to the UK in 1992 for better work and education opportunities.

 When we first arrived, I hardly spoke any English. At school, my teachers thought my GCSE grades weren’t good enough and advised me to apply for chemistry or biology – both of which I excelled at – instead of medicine.

 Despite this, I ended up graduating from medical school in 2003 and started working as an intensive care doctor shortly after.

 Then in 2011, peaceful protests in Syria were calling for freedom and dignity. As the revolution swept across the country, the brutal régime met it with bullets and bombs – so began the war that goes on to this day.




 I was enthralled and terrified in equal measure. I was inspired by the people from my home country demanding their freedom and dignity, yet terrified at the response they would get and what it would mean for my family and Syria as a whole.

 As a doctor in London training to be an anaesthetist at the time, I did the only thing I knew I could and joined the humanitarian effort.

 Alongside my full-time work in the NHS, I started to work every evening and weekend to raise funds – from friends and colleagues or holding events – collect medical supplies and help build field hospitals and clinics to treat injured civilians via Skype with Syrian medics on the ground.

 My holidays became medical missions through the newly formed Syrian-led charity, Hand in Hand for Syria.

 As a volunteer and then the medical director, I travelled to northern Syria to carry out needs and quality assessments, support the build of six of our hospitals, deliver medical and humanitarian aid and carry out clinical work.

 After the bombing incident in 2013, and for a long while – instead of jasmine – Syria became the smell of singed flesh.

 Despite the horrors I witnessed, I also saw the best of humanity – the health and aid workers who risked their lives every day to save others. They still inspire me and make me more hopeful than ever.



 It didn’t hit me immediately, but in the years after, I realised trauma had taken up home in every cell of my body. I finally hit a wall after 10 years of dedicated work as a doctor, humanitarian and founder of CanDo – an innovative humanitarian start-up supporting locally-led humanitarian work and local frontline health and aid workers in war-affected communities.

 I fell into a valley of darkness. I felt incredulous that I was still advocating to stop bombing hospitals and schools. I also felt lost, trapped and confused. I could no longer see my sense of purpose and self-worth.

 Though I am now able to own it all, by the grace of God, it remains the case that I would swap every achievement and accolade to not have my country shattered in a million pieces.

 To not have lost over 30 members of my extended family. To not see the rampant poverty and homelessness. To not have had our fields napalmed. To not have seen so much grief, shock and horror on so many faces.

 I would swap it all to not have witnessed the worst of humanity.'

‘5 Seasons of Revolution’ Review

 

 'In 5 Seasons, a young Syrian reporter who, for security purposes, goes only by the first name of Lina, put together footage she shot of herself and comrades as the revolution was going down in her homeland, chronicling a daily grind filled with tension, anticipation and lots of waiting — for friends to make it back safe from a march or from prison, or for Assad to launch another deadly attack on his own people.

 Although Lina is from an upper-class family and lives safely in Damascus, danger is never far away for her and her fellow reporters/revolutionaries, who fear arrest at all times. Each time they head out the door, the risk is there, and driving around town becomes a game of trying to dodge or get through checkpoints set up by the army.

 By the end of the film, Lina, the journalists Bassel and Malaz, and the activists Rima and Susu have all been detained at some point or another. All of them are forced to flee from Syria, possibly to never return, while one of them doesn’t make it out alive. 5 Seasons is thus a fly-on-the-wall portrait of a revolution as seen from the inside, but also a portrait of a young generation whose lives would be completed upended by the war.

 Lina, who had just graduated from journalism school when the uprising began, bravely went out to documents events at a time when reporters were often rounded up and imprisoned by the régime. She traveled to Homs early on as it became a hotbed for the opposing FSA (Free Syrian Army), composed of soldiers who defected from Assad’s régime. Soon the government was bombing Homs on a daily basis, targeting civilians and soldiers alike in a bloody reprisal that leveled the whole city.



 Lina captures some of this devastation, including a harrowing interview with an FSA fighter who was paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet. But for the most part she remains stuck in Damascus as her country gradually falls apart, occasionally arguing with her friends about whether taking up arms will help the cause or only make things worse. By the time the film ends in 2015, Lina and her friends are doing whatever they can to make it out of the country in one piece.

 And yet, there’s hope amid the destruction, both physical and psychological, that Lina chronicles, in a film that shows how people manage to band together against oppression in the darkest of times. This sentiment is best reflected in Lina’s close friend Rima, a vibrant young social worker who fearlessly hit the streets of Damascus brandishing a banner that read “Stop the Killing,” launching a movement that would spread to other cities.

 It was a futile gesture in the face of Assad’s régime, but far from a forgotten one, and Rima became a public symbol of protest in Syria thanks to her courage. She winds up being arrested several times, including for a long prison stay where her fate remains uncertain for nearly two months. When she finally gets released during an exchange of prisoners with Turkey, she spends a night smoking cigarettes and catching up with her friends, a smile on her face. This is an image that will stay with us.'

My dream is 'to help build a democratic Syria'

 'Joumana Seif is a good listener. The 52-year-old Syrian lawyer and women's rights activist doesn't fidget, her eyes focus patiently and it is easy to understand why women are able to open up to her.

 "I've always fought for women's rights," Seif says. Even back in the 1990s, when she worked at her family's successful Adidas franchise in Damascus, she was already focusing on staff welfare and supporting women in their positions.

 However, those days now seem like a lifetime ago.

 In 1994, her father, Riad Seif, spurred by the huge success he was having with his business, entered the political stage as independent member of the Syrian parliament. But his criticism of the corrupt elite and calls for economic reforms weren't received well by then-President Hafez Assad.



 Riad Seif and his family started to be increasingly in the focus of the security forces. In addition, production materials for his factory were withheld, and eventually the company had to be sold.

 "I understood that I needed to know more about the law, to be able to defend my father and to join the fight for human rights in Syria," said Seif. With the support of her mother, who helped with her three young children, Seif started studying law at Beirut Arab University in 2003.

 By the time of her graduation in 2007, Seif had long become politically engaged herself. After the Syrian strongman Hafez Assad died in June 2000, she joined her father's regular "Damascus Spring" meetings with other members of the political opposition in his living room in Damascus. Shortly after, the group founded the National Dialogue Forum, an initiative for political change and freedom in Syria.



 However, the initiative was soon without a leader: In September 2001, after Riad Seif had called for an end of the monopoly of the new President Bashar Assad's ruling Baath Party, he was sentenced to prison.

 Joumana Seif became his sole connection to the opposition. "It was a very difficult time for us," she said. "We were almost isolated, under pressure from the security branches and scared that they would take us to prison as well," she said, adding that she "wouldn't be able to repeat this kind of life."

 However, along with the increasing crackdown against dissidents by the new president, her father became more and more recognized on the international stage. In 2003, Joumana Seif traveled to the German city of Weimar to receive the Human Rights Award on his behalf.

 But upon her return, their life in Syria didn't get any easier.

 "In March 2007, I was arrested at a demonstration with many of my friends. They pushed us onto a truck and scared us by accelerating and braking hard," she said, adding that "they eventually released us with the warning that next time we will go to prison." Those words carried two meanings: the threat of being behind bars for years or forever, and that of sexual violence.



 Despite the growing number of people who were going missing in Syria's infamous prisons, including her uncle, cousin and younger brother, Eyad, it took two attempts on her father's life and the outbreak of the Syrian revolution that led to the war for Joumana Seif to decide it was time to leave her home country.

 Together with her three children and her parents, she went to Egypt in September 2012.

 Riad Seif, who suffered from prostate cancer and needed medical help, applied for a German visa. "I thought we'd stay in Cairo until my father returns from Germany, and will then see if we can return to Syria," she said.

 However, the situation in Egypt changed in 2013. Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was ousted in a military coup led by the then-minister of defense, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who became president himself the following year.

 "The rising sentiment against Syrians made it difficult for us to stay," she said. Since the war against the opposition was raging in Syria, she decided to follow her father to Germany, and the family left for Berlin in September 2013.



 By then, Joumana Seif was even more determined to fight for human rights and to help Syrian women. She co-founded the Syrian Women's Network in 2013, the Syrian Feminist Lobby in 2014 and the Syrian Women's Political Movement in 2017.

 That year, when she joined the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights as a research fellow, Seif also started advocating for the recognition of sexual and gender-based violence as crimes against humanity. Her focus area: Syria.

 In the run-up to the Al-Khatib trial, the world's first legal proceeding investigating the horrors of Syria's torture chambers, which took place at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany between 2020 and 2022, she spoke to hundreds of male and female survivors of torture and sexual violence. "It is a lot of pain to bear when women open up; it follows me into my dreams," she said.



 But the personal testimonies weren't the only remarkable part of the trial for Joumana Seif. Her father was questioned on day 26 as a witness, as he was the person who had helped the main defendant, Anwar Raslan, get a visa for Germany in 2014. Riad Seif had believed Raslan when he said he feared for his life after joining the opposition in 2012. However, Raslan was not able to prove that he was indeed an opposition supporter, and the trial ended with his being given a life sentence for murder, rape and sexual assault committed at the notorious Al-Khatib prison.

 For Joumana Seif, however, this trial was a stepping stone on the way to justice in Syria. "The meaning of my life is to help build a democratic Syria that offers the same rights to men and women and a life in dignity," she said.

 "Only then will the struggle will be over." '

Protest over signs of a thaw in relations with Turkey

 

 'Hundreds of Syrians in the rebel-held north protested on Friday against signs of a thaw between Ankara and Damascus after their defence ministers met in Moscow for the first time since 2011.

 Several hundred demonstrators gathered in Al-Bab, a town controlled by rebel factions long backed by Ankara, brandishing banners reading: “The revolution is an idea, you can’t kill an idea.”

 “We will not reconcile, we cannot reconcile, we don’t want to reconcile,” said Mr Sohbi Khabiyeh, one of the demonstrators who had been displaced from the suburbs of Damascus.

 The 54-year-old described Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a “criminal”.

 “We will never reconcile with the Assad regime,” he added. “Don’t help Assad against us, stand with us.”



 The demonstration comes after the Syrian, Turkish and Russian defence ministers met in Moscow on Wednesday for the first time since the Syrian conflict broke out over a decade ago.

 Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Turkish and Syrian counterparts, Mr Hulusi Akar and Mr Ali Mahmoud Abbas, discussed “ways to resolve the Syrian crisis, the problem of refugees and joint efforts to combat extremist groups in Syria”, Moscow said.

 The meeting was just the latest sign of a thaw in relations between Damascus and Ankara – the key backer of opposition forces in war-torn Syria.



 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in recent years repeatedly called Mr Assad an “assassin”, spoke in November of a “possible” meeting with his Syrian counterpart.

 Nearly half a million people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, which has forced around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.

 Similar protests were held in other rebel-held districts of Aleppo province.

 In the northwestern city of Idlib, controlled by the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), dozens raised slogans hostile to Mr Erdogan.

 “I came to protest to express my rejection of the statements calling for a rapprochement with the criminal Assad regime which has displaced everyone,” said demonstrator Salwa Abdel Rahman.

 “Even if the whole world were to agree to reconcile with the criminal regime, we would not reconcile,” she added.'