A Syrian Kurdish woman walks in a refugee camp in the town of Suruc, Sanliurfa province in Turkey, in October.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By
DANA BALLOUT
Updated Dec. 1, 2014 3:30 p.m. ET
The United Nations World Food Programme on Monday said it would halt its aid to 1.7 million Syrian refugees on the cusp of winter due to lack of funding.
In a statement on their website, the WFP said the consequences of the decision will be “devastating” for the refugees and their host countries.
“A suspension of WFP food assistance will endanger the health and safety of these refugees and will potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighboring host countries,” WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin said in the statement.
The decision will impact refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, and comes at a time when temperatures have begun to drop in the region, raising concerns around how refugees will be able to endure the potentially harsh winter.
Many Syrian refugees, especially in Lebanon, where the majority of refugees reside, live in makeshift tents and camps and suffer from a lack of fuel, clean water, proper sanitation and warm clothing.
The U.N. agency warned in September it was running out of funds and that cutbacks were inevitable if additional support wasn’t received.
The inability to secure the $64 million needed for the program to continue also ends the WFP’s electronic voucher program. The e-vouchers allowed refugee families access to a prepaid credit card that could be used in participating local stores. The program had contributed $800 million to the economies of the host countries, the statement said.
If sufficient financial support is secured, the program will resume immediately, the statement said.
As the Syrian crisis nears the end of its fourth year, the WFP isn’t the only U.N. agency struggling to meet its funding appeals, said Lama Fakih, Syria and Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Of the $3.7 billion request made in June 2014 by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Syria’s neighboring countries and other humanitarian agencies, only 51% of the funds have been received thus far.
“As the number of Syrian refugees increases, 3.2 million now, the needs increase, and despite international attention diverted to other crises, Syrians are still very much in need,” said Lama Fakih, Syria and Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
There are several reasons contributing to the lack of sufficient aid to Syrian refugees, most notably the various humanitarian emergencies happening simultaneously around the world that have diverted the world’s attention and wallets away from Syria.
According to Joelle Eid, the WFP’s communication officer stationed in Amman, Jordan, the need for humanitarian aid has skyrocketed this year. The WFP is currently dealing with five high priority emergencies around the world, including the Ebola crisis, Eid said.
“If we don’t urgently get this assistance, get the $64 million for December alone, people will simply go hungry,” she added.
Isil’s extreme cruelty and filmic savagery has shocked the world, but it is not very different from what leaders of Iraq and Syria – and to some extent their colonial predecessors – have been doing to local people for decades
The beheading of Alan Henning was not Isil’s first, as we all know full well, nor will it be the last. But by ignoring pleas for mercy from across the Muslim world, the group set any doubt to rest as to the nature of its need for video horror violence.
That violence is in part religious – a public insistence that its own ultra-aggressive interpretation of Islam is more “authentic” than the wishy-washy versions of Muslim politicians, scholars and ordinary people who want to live peacefully and get on with the modern world.
It demands recognition that Islam can be spread by the sword in the 21st century, just as much as it was in the 7th.
The violence is also rooted in the political culture of Iraq and Syria, the countries from which Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has sprung.
The extreme cruelty with which Isil’s “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his predecessors have avenged themselves on Westerners has revealed a culture of violence to an international public. But it is not very different from what these countries’ leaders – and to some extent their colonial predecessors – have been doing to local people for décades.
Most importantly and specifically, the violence reflects a need to show a continuous momentum. Success, however horrific, breeds success; if you depend on apparently psychopathic behaviour to press your advance, you need to recruit more psychopaths, and to show it works.
A United Nations report last week showed the importance of this sense of momentum. The headlines were full of the admirable words of Human Rights reportage: it talked of “gross abuses of human rights that have been perpetrated by Isil and associated armed groups, with an apparent systematic and widespread character”.
What that doesn’t capture is the constant movement and repetition of Isil’s actions, the reiteration of its overwhelming purpose. The greater the violence, the more the idea that this is a zero-sum game, a question put to Sunni Muslims of whether they want to be winners or losers, is rubbed home.
In June, The Sunday Telegraph reported how an Isil pickup truck killing party swept through Turkmen Shia villages in northern Iraq, killing scores of people at random – old men gunned down outside their homes, women shot dead as they fled. Any sign of trying to hide was doubly punished.
That is, by now, the well-recognised modus operandi of the group, showing their followers that they have the strength and ruthlessness to lead.
But as with everything Isil does, there was a twist.
Six weeks after the Telegraph interviewed survivors in a half-built mosque where they had taken refuge in a town nearby, Isil came back.
The jihadists set off a car bomb near the building site, killing 12 of those inside, including Abdulwahid Reza Kahir, the patriarch of one of the families.
An old man in a turban and farmer’s robe, already mourning the random killings of his son, cousins, nephews, including a 15-year-old: there was no precisely definable military or political purpose to his death, other than to show that, for jihadists, anything is possible.
There will be no end to the harrying of the enemy, an idea that is writ through the history of conquest.
It is easy to say that the national psychosis which gave rise to Isil was triggered by the American and British invasion of 2003. There is of course some truth in that: al-Baghdadi’s inspiration is Isil’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who also ordered the filming of decapitations of western hostages, sawing off the head of the American Nicholas Berg himself.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Reuters)
Zarqawi was already a local al-Qaeda leader, but his particular brand of filmic savagery, mostly inflicted on Iraqi Shia, flourished in the lawlessness and increasing sectarianism of the country in the wake of the invasion. It is a platitude that the absence of order allows deranged men to prosper.
The defeat of Saddam Hussein also fed into the widespread Middle Eastern perception that Sunni Islam is under particular threat in the Arab world, is suffering an Arab equivalent of what the Chinese call “a century of humiliation”: colonial rule, the existence of the state of Israel and its repeated defeat of its (Sunni) Palestinian enemies, the economic catastrophes represented by Egypt and Yemen.
For those with ethnic or sectarian inferiority complexes – in this case both – there is a primal appeal in seeing your foe kneel before you and die.
However, the idea that politics is not just occasionally violent, but requires of its essence demonstrative violence, long predates 2003.
The modern Iraqi state is founded upon it. When the royal family, imposed by the British Empire in its dying days, was overthrown by a coup in 1958, the prime minister was not only shot dead with the king.
His corpse was dragged through the streets of Baghdad, publicly hanged and then burned.
The fate of the coup leader, Abdul Karim Qasem, when he was in turn overthrown five years later, is even more reminiscent of Isil’s approach to the media. He was shot on live television, and the state network’s camera rested on his bloodied corpse for the rest of the day, army officers occasionally intruding to insert a knife to prove his death for the viewer.
The lawlessness, in other words, is not just a product of the absence of a state, but written into the state. In Syria next door, ordinary people routinely tell stories of similarly pointless horrors, that served some political purpose while having little apparent rationality, from long before the civil war.
One Christian friend describes watching, as a child, her nine-year-old playmate next door being lined up against a wall and executed, after the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 1982.
Another describes how a secret school truant smoking session in a Damascus cemetery was broken up by police who wrongly thought the teenagers were drug dealers. One boy disappeared, arriving home without his finger nails a few days later.
These are just stories plucked at random.
In war, everything escalates. The same regime that did these “small”, local crimes then began mutilating corpses of teenagers who opposed it. In 2011 one 13-year-old boy was sent home without his penis. From then on, anything was possible, impunity was written into the code of conduct. Impunity’s apotheosis was the attack by a regime militia on the town of Baniyas, where among the 400 victims, many of them children with their throats cut, was a pregnant woman whose body had been cut out so her foetus could be killed too.
Like Isil, the militia’s leader boasted publicly for the camera of what he was about to do.
These victims were, in the nature of the war, Sunni. The need to see your enemy kneel and die in a pool of blood is common to both extremes.
Can the West do anything to stop this? It should only try with humility. It is all too easy to find pictures on the Internet of Western soldiers – French, Italian, even British – posing for pictures with the heads of their colonial victims in the all-too-recent past.
There is no start point to the cycle of violence.
We do, however, have the experience of putting back together what is psychologically broken, as Syria and Iraq undoubtedly are. Whether that can be done from the air, or even in the halls of the United Nations, is another matter.
Mr Henning was delivering aid to Syria when he was kidnapped, as Paul Wood reports
The Salford taxi driver was delivering aid to Syria in December when he was kidnapped and then held hostage by IS.
IS threatened to kill him in footage last month showing the death of Briton David Haines, and in this video they threaten US aid worker Peter Kassig.
David Cameron said Britain would do all it could “to hunt down these murderers and bring them to justice”.
The prime minister said the killing of father-of-two Mr Henning, 47, showed “how barbaric and repulsive” IS was.
“My thoughts and prayers tonight are with Alan’s wife Barbara, their children and all those who loved him,” he said.
“Alan had gone to Syria to help get aid to people of all faiths in their hour of need.”
Mr Henning’s wife Barbara had this week appealed for her husband’s release, saying: “He is innocent.”
Volunteer Mr Henning was on his fourth aid mission to Syria when he was captured within minutes of arriving in the country last December.
The prime minister will be briefed by intelligence and security chiefs on Saturday.
Downing Street said the “barbarity” of the act “underlines why it is right for Britain to join in the attacks against IS”, according to BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith.
“It is also pointed out that ministers have known for some time the risk to Western hostages and cannot allow that to determine British foreign policy,” our correspondent added.
Number Ten has declined to comment on the possible use of special forces in the fight against IS.
‘Generous character’
IS has previously released videos showing the apparent beheading of two US journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and British aid worker Mr Haines.
The video released on Friday is yet to be verified, but it appears to show Mr Henning kneeling beside a militant, who is dressed in black, in a desert setting.
The footage ends with an IS fighter threatening a man they identify as Mr Kassig.
In a statement, Mr Kassig’s family said he had converted to Islam and referred to him as Abdul Rahman Kassig.
The family asked people around the world to pray for his release and that of “all innocent people being held hostage in the Middle East and around the globe”.
They also asked people to pray for Mr Henning’s family, adding: “We have read about his work and his generous character with great respect and admiration.”
Mr Henning’s friend Majid Freeman described him as a “selfless, humble, courageous individual” who had simply wanted to help others.
Mr Freeman, who was with him on the convoy when he was captured, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He was helping the innocent people the rest of the world had abandoned.
“It doesn’t make sense to kill him.”
‘British accent’
BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera said the footage was similar to previous videos released by IS, though slightly shorter.
He said it included a reference to last week’s vote by UK Parliament to authorise air strikes against IS in Iraq.
Like previous videos it features a militant with an apparently British accent, he added.
The UK Foreign Office said in a statement: “We are aware of the video and are working urgently to verify the contents.
“If true, this is a further disgusting murder.
“We are offering the family every support possible; they ask to be left alone at this time.”
The US said it was evaluating the video and if proved real, it was “another demonstration of the brutality” of the militant group.
Analysis
Frank Gardner, security correspondent, BBC News
David Cameron’s vow to catch the jihadist killers of Alan Henning and bring them to justice would seem to match the mood of the nation.
But judging by the track record of previous such cases of hostages being murdered overseas, this promise has little likelihood of being fulfilled.
Tony Blair made the same pledge after Ken Bigley from Liverpool was beheaded in 2004, Gordon Brown did the same when tourist Edwin Dwyer was kidnapped and killed in the Sahara, and Mr Cameron vowed to punish those who besieged the Algerian gas plant last year.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, there has not been one single case of any murderers of British hostages ever being brought to justice in Britain.
Barack Obama is embarking on a global course correction, if not an outright reversal: the policy of “don’t do stupid stuff” – the non-interventionism so praised by the Farid Zakarias and Tom Friedmans of the world – is getting forced out, albeit in the typical Obama fashion of admitting nothing and never going fast or far enough.
And to hear the Chuck Hagels and John Kerrys of the administration tell the story for him, it’s all the fault of the Islamic State (Isis), which is “beyond just a terrorist group”, “an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated” – a feat which, realistically, will require some intervention not just in Iraq … but in Syria.
It’s difficult to do the right thing when you’ve already fucked up so badly. When the Obama administration refused to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria in 2011, the indifference gave rise to despair and forced people to abandon their nonviolent ways to defend themselves, effectively transforming the nonviolent protest movement into an armed resistance. Obama’s refusal to then support the rebels following the advice of his then-secretary of state, among other officials, created a vacuum that was gradually filled by extremist elements emerging out of the woodwork and jihadists pouring across the borders, a combination that paved the way for the emergence of the newly troubling and feared Isis.
Now, Isis has a vision being carried out – effectively, if with pure evil – by technocratic leaders with succession plans, flexible but enduing structures, and major funding, with major operations based out of its hub in Syria. Soon, some of its acolytes might make like Hezbollah and run legitimate businesses across multiple countries that secretly fund terror; some already appear to be attracted to the radicalized appeal of Isis leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declaring a new Caliphate.
No wonder Obama is finding it so difficult to justify a policy of minimal engagement anymore – perhaps even to himself. Blanket, cold-hearted realism doesn’t work when networked, cold-hearted terrorism does. The line between realism and cynicism has always been too thin, and has long been crossed by the Administration. While realism is laudable, cynicism ends up producing the very outcomes that realism intends to avoid. Letting a region take care of itself is impossible to allow when your spies are telling you about the rise of a terror group across the world, including the West – of terrorists that are effectively becoming a global movement of disaffected Muslims everywhere.
Some “realists” are advocating cooperation with Bashar al-Assad. But that wouldn’t just being doing “stupid stuff” – it would be downright delusional, since cooperating with dictators who abuse their own people is exactly what gives rise to extremist anti-Western movements.
The only way for Obama to stop doing stupid stuff with his foreign policy is to arm moderate rebels in Syria, to bomb Isis bases in both Syria and Iraq and to finally impose a no-fly zone on the Assad regime. This combination of tactics could allow the Syrian opposition – which has thus far been unable to govern the liberated areas due to Assad’s use of aerial strikes, including barrel bombs, scud missiles, and, on occasion, chemical weapons and poison gas – to move in and work with the local councils to begin returning the basic services to the local communities, bringing a measure of relief to the local civilian population. Imposing a no-fly zone also avoids having to supply advanced weapons to rebels, including TOW missiles and MANPADs, thus minimizing the risk of having them end up in the wrong hands. Still, the opposition will have its work cut out for it in terms of ensuring effective governance of the areas under their control, especially when it comes to reaching agreements between Islamist and secularist currents. But by controlling the flow of humanitarian aid and the funds required for the reconstruction processes, the administration and other members of international community could exercise leverage to allow for compromises to be reached.
Obama already plans to take a leading role at next month’s UN General Assembly, where strategies for holding back Isis will be a top priority. But Western and Middle Eastern leaders need to begin preparing for a peace conference following such strikes, because a real transition plan for a post-conflict and post-Assad Syria needs to be developed. Talks will not be easy (and could drag out for months if not longer), but if the regime’s ability to wreak havoc on rebel communities is curbed by strikes and the economic blockade against it is strengthened, time will not be on its side – rendering hopes for an eventual breakthrough more realistic.
It’s about time for the Obama administration to do the right thing. It’s about time, after doing so much stupid stuff and aiding in the rise of Isis, to begin resolving a conflict that has killed close to 200,000 people in less than four years, and produced millions of refugees, becoming the worst humanitarian disaster since the Cold War.
Yes, American strikes may make disaffected Muslims more eager to join Isis. Yes, we may be witnessing the birth of a new Islamic sect. But Barack Obama needs to stop fighting the symptoms while embracing the disease – to become a true realist and not a cynical one. Sectarian violence was not inevitable in Syria, as some analysts argued at the beginning of the revolution, but indifference and cynicism made it so. Obama needs to engage in the region with a positive mindset, knowing that he can actually make a positive difference.
Victims of the August 21st, 2013 chemical weapons attack
On August 21st, 2013, the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad committed one of the most shocking war crimes of the 21st century, gassing nearly 1,500 people to death in Ghouta, outside of Damascus. Assad’s regime, which faced pockets of significant rebel resistance throughout western Syria and inside the capital, soon faced the prospect of imminent U.S. military strikes: days after the Ghouta attack, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerryall but promisedswift retribution for the chemical massacre.
Reuters
Map demarcating control of Syria on August 6, 2013 — two weeks before the Ghouta attack
But Assad’s criminality paid off. Today, regime forces areclosing in on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and one of the secular revolutionaries’ last remaining strongholds. Assad warned as early as 2011 that his government was a bulwark against Islamist extremists threatening to unseat him; three years of killing have turned that false choice into a reality.Most importantly, Assad has a level of international respectability today that seemed unthinkable a year ago — and the Ghouta chemical weapons attack and its aftermath are part of the reason why.
Today, it’s clear that Assad gained from the attack, which proved that the international community wasn’t prepared to go after him even after a serious breach in international law, and that their only alternative was to adjust to the reality of his likely long-term survival.
Although the Ghouta attacks seemed to obligate U.S. action under President Barack Obama’s chemical weapons “red line,” there were early signs that Obama did not want to obligate himself to carrying out military strikes.
On August 31, Obama laid out the case that punishing Assad for his violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was a vital national interest — but thenleft the use of force to a Congressional votewithout calling for an emergency session of the body, which was then in an August recess.
On September 9, Kerrysuggestedthat Assad could simply give up his chemical weapons and join the CWC in order to resolve the crisis. This is exactly what ended up happening. With the oversight of Assad’s allies in Moscow — a governmentwith its own patchy record of semi-compliance with the CWC— Assad eventually disposed of 1,200 tons of chemical agents without a single U.S. tomahwak missile being fired.
But there were still costs. Practically, the deal required formal cooperation between the U.S. and the Middle East’s most violent, destabilizing, and isolated regime. The deal had some immediate consequences on the ground as well. As journalist Michael Weiss noted in January of 2014, Assad waged a scorched-earth campaign in order to clear the Damascus-to-Homs highwayfor the delivery of the weapons for eventual disposal, using the dealas cover for an increasingly brutal campaign against his opponents.
And Assad didn’t get bombed by the most powerful military on earth, or suffer any punishment or loss in status for his criminality.
The consequences of a U.S. attack against Assad is now a matter of speculation. They might have acted as a much-needed force multiplier for the beleaguered Free Syrian Army, which was fighting both ISIS and the Assad regime and was in a much stronger position than it is currently. A blow to a leading Iranian ally like Assad might have forced Tehran to redouble its efforts on propping the regime in Damascus — leaving it less capable of pursuing its disastrous andmeddlesomepolicies in neighboring Iraq.
Airstrikes would have precluded a chemical weapons deal that turned Russia and Assad into the U.S.’s de facto security partners. Without the deal, Assad would never have been congratulated for his good citizenship while bombing his opponents into submission while stillretaining the infrastructure needed to re-start chemical weapons productionif the tide of the conflict ever turned.
Nearly all of Assad’s calculations have paid off over the past year. His regime has beat a tactical retreat to Syria’s urban and coastal northwest, home to most of the country’s critical infrastructure and population centers. Jihadist groupsoversee the country’s gas and oil fieldsand ensure that the secular rebels — who Assad has always considered his real enemies — are squeezed from both east and west.
International legitimacy
And the chemical weapons deal removed the international community’s main point of contention with Assad’s government, namely his continued violation of the CWC — never mind that there’scredible evidence of regime violationsas recently as this past May.
The deal — and the attack that precipitated it — gave Assad the freedom and global legitimacy to win his country’s civil war.
Reuters
Map of control of Syria from July 3, 2014
A year after one of the ghastliest war crimes in recent decades, Assad is evenlooking at how to use the ISIS threatto win Western countries back to his side, and may even findwilling partnersin the U.S. foreign policy establishment.The cost of Assad’s strategy has been high: 9 million refugees, 180,000 dead, repeated uses of chemical weapons, and the creation of a war zone stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Please, tell me more about your “Resistance” project, and how you are fighting the good fight against imperialism and occupation and cultural hegemony. About how you think the necktie is a remnant of the uniform worn by the old Knights Templar (it’s not but I like to see you keep bringing that up). Tell me more about how the freedom of the individual, this so-called negative and positive freedom you keep liking to invoke, is so, so, very important to the historic struggles of the brown man as he shakes off the yoke of his oppressor. Tell me about your amazing plan to liberate Jerusalem, for the dignity of all Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (no dignity to any of them until then, of course). Tell me about your glorious leaders and martyrs, about “keeping your word” with a brutal dictator who has butchered the Syrian people just so that he can be a president like his Daddy.
You’ll only be happy to, I am sure. But right now there is something you’re not telling me. Right now the so-called “Zionist Enemy” has, through their courts and laws, imprisoned a former president on charges of rape, and that there is a former prime minister who will now serve six years in prison on charges of bribery. Maybe they’re not as good at picking their leaders as you are. And you definitely don’t want to tell me about how your torture chambers make anything the villainous “Empire” can think of, including Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – yes, especially them – look like Disney land in comparison. You don’t want to tell me that your pet dictator and the militias you send to support him have killed more Syrians than everybody killed by US drone strikes since 2001. That they have displaced in three years more Syrians than the “Zionist enemy” ever did when it took part of Palestine in 1948, and then the rest of it in 1967. I guess these are things you don’t want to tell me about…
Stopped in the middle of the sea by the Egyptian Coast Guard, aboard a boat that was sinking shortly after the start of its journey to Europe. Locked within the premises of a police station in Alexandria, where the police prevent the arrival of relief supplies of Caritas
WRITTEN by STEFANO PASTA, translated by Mary Rizzo
MILAN- Through WhatsApp, we interviewed Syrian refugees held since 14 April in Al Rashid police station in Alexandria, Egypt. Having failed to reach Europe with a barge, they were handed over to the Egyptian authorities, but now risk transfer to the prison of Al Burj , or – even worse – repatriation to Syria.
What is your situation like today?
Disastrous hygienic conditions are dangerous due to a broken sewer. We are 144 persons living in two rooms measuring only a few meters, one room for women and one for men. We sleep on the ground and we cannot wash. We try to keep calm, but when it happened a few days ago there were moments of tension between us, the police prevented the visits for that day and suspended the coffee and the food brought from outside by Caritas Alexandria. The boys and men are still able to resist in some way, but the women and children are really at the limit; there are two women with heart problems who finished their medicine and they need to get out immediately.
What is the situation of children?
There are 44 children under the age of 12, while the total number of children is 63. There are a few who are trying to play with water bottles and they are the only ones who can get distracted for a moment. At night, however, they find it difficult to sleep. As of yesterday, almost all of them have developed a sort of skin disease that no one can identify. Two children of one and two and a half years, alone with his mother because his father was killed in Syria, were suffering particularly yesterday , they were taken to the hospital five times because they suffer from asthma and staying in this place of detention is equivalent to sleeping in a garbage dump. We are also concerned about another 4 year old girl, suffering from cardiac difficulties, who had begun to complain about the chest pain already in the midst of the sea.
Why did you flee from Syria?
Many of us have fled to avoid conscription in the army of Assad, others are activists against the regime who are risking their lives. Then there are families who have fled their homes because they could not survive in some cities, people are dying of hunger because of the siege of the regular army (regime army), which does not allow the entry of food. There is no bread and milk for the children, while the rice when one can find it, costs almost twenty dollars a kilo. Life like that is simply impossible, that’s why we escaped.
Have you talked with a lawyer or with international authorities?
No, none of us was able to speak with a lawyer or has received a sheet with the written reasons for why we are being detained. We met a lawyer named Ahmad, who initially presented himself as belonging to UNHCR, but then he began to terrorise us by threatening to have us repatriated and he revealed that he works for Egyptian National Security. This is our greatest fear, because it would be tantamount to a death sentence; also return to Lebanon would be very dangerous, since it has already happened that Hezbollah has handed over some refuges to Assad. After a week from the meeting with Ahmad, presented to us is a UN official, at least this is what he is telling us, along with an interpreter, in which we explained how we ended up in the police station.
How did it happen?
What happened before our arrest was a nightmare. We were ready to face the Mediterranean to reach Europe and we had entrusted ourselves to smugglers, who treated us badly, screaming profanities and threatening to beat us with bars, even children. With small boats, we were taken in groups on a larger boat, where we were parked at sea for seven days waiting for it to fill up to 250 people. When we were ready to leave, the same smugglers noticed that the boat was about to sink. It was the worst time since we left Syria: we could die and nobody would know. Then, after a fight broke out between the smugglers on the boat and the organisers were on the ground, we were able to convince them to bring us back; we passed the Coast Guard, but no one saw us. Once on the beach, we ourselves went to the Egyptian authorities, asking for help, but since that day, April 14, we were all arrested, including children.
Have you heard of other refugees detained in Egypt?
Of course, we have detailed information because they are members of our own families. The wife of a man who is here at Al Rashid is held in another place, then we know where the traveling companions arrested with us are. In the police station in Al Montazah there are 22 people, 55 in Chabrakhit and an unknown number – but with so many children – in Miami.
What are you asking for?
We call for the respect of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits any member country the repatriation (refoulement ) of persons to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened . We ask UNHCR and the European embassies (we initiated contact with the Austrian one) to be able to apply for asylum. We ask the Europeans: would you like your children to have the Mediterranean as their graves? Open a humanitarian corridor, let us save our lives legally.
A short film about Syrian human rights activist Razan Zaitouneh, a revolutionary heroine now abducted, probably by Jaish al-Islam. Contributions from writer Samar Yazbek and activist Razan Ghazzawi.
In the runup to the Geneva 2 peace talks, there was widespread speculation that the opposition team at the negotiations lacked the leverage and influence among rebel brigades on the ground in Syria, to make any agreement meaningful (a point that became moot as the talks concluded with no agreements whatsoever having been reached).
Assad is trapped by the limitations imposed by his own rhetoric. It cant end well for him.
And yet recent events on the ground in Homs, where a UN and Red Crescent aid convoy to besieged rebel areas was shelled and shot up by regime shabihas in the city, and the murder of the British doctor Abbas Khan, just mere hours before his scheduled release from the regime jails, clearly indicate that far from being a president in firm control of his intelligence services and militiamen, Bashar Assad is a man who finds himself trapped by a narrative of his own making.
By failing to defeat an opposition he has consistently painted as posing an existential threat to his own Alawite constituency, a narrative that has also made impossible even minor confidence building measures such as permitting aid to the besieged rebel areas, and the release of high profile prisoners such as Dr Khan, measures which could have been built on to eventually ensure a political arrangement to end the conflict, Assad has trapped himself in a course of action that can only end in one way; his death at the hands of his fellow Alawites.
That there should be bitter opposition to even such minor compromises among the regime’s supporters will come as no surprise to anyone closely following events in Syria. In June 2013, when the Syrian army, backed by units from the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizbollah invaded my home town of Telkelakh, the army and mukhabarat went door to door, ransacking homes and arresting people pretty much at random. A relative of mine in the town at the time, whose son had for years enjoyed close ties to very senior regime officials, thought that his family’s well known relations with the regime would protect him.
When regime shabihas burst into his home, this relative immediately held up a picture of his son shaking hands with none other than El Presidente, the Eye Doctor himself. “Look, look!” he said, “my son with el-doktor Bashar”.
The shabihas took one look at the picture, and broke my relative’s jaw. “Kess emak ‘ala em el doktor Bashar!”
Ouch. Being as close to an honest opinion poll as you are going to get in Assadstanian Syria, that pretty summed up much of the regime rank and file’s feelings towards Assad, an attitude I found confirmed time and again while living in Tartous. Assad has created a narrative where the only acceptable outcome from his constituency’s point of view is a total and crushing defeat of the “takfiri” opposition, a result Assad has found it utterly impossible to deliver on. If you have painted your enemy as nihilistic savages, hell bent on the subjugation of the entire country under an “Islamist emirate”, then the only way the Alawite communities in Homs, Damascus and the coast will be preserved is by the complete and total annihilation of these “takfiris” and their supporters.
What then, ya doktor, are you doing giving up the country’s chemical weapons? The shabihas, who have died in their tens of thousands over the course of the conflict, don’t want to see deals made giving up sarin gas in exchange for the regime’s survival. They want to see that sarin unleashed in massive quantities on rebel areas still holding out in Homs and Damascus.
The mukhabarat, who have no illusions as to what awaits them should the regime fall, do not want to see high profile prisoners such as Dr Khan released just to make Assad look good. Dr Khan’s savage and brutal murder a mere hours before his scheduled release was as much an F-U to Assad as it was an act of revenge against the British. Galloway? Who is George Galloway? If it is Galloway’s dream to become the world’s first Scottish Ayatollah, the mukhabarat, who have also died in their thousands during the war, apparently don’t feel obliged to give up anything to grant him any PR points.
And ya doktor, you have spent months convincing the Alawites of Zahra in Homs that are they besieged on all sides by savage “takfiris” and their NATO-Wahabi-Salafi-Zionist backers. Why then are you allowing aid convoys into their besieged areas? The only surprise of the day wasn’t that the UN and Red Crescent convoy came under attack; it’s that anyone in their right mind actually thought that such a deal could be carried off without a bitter and immediate backlash from the shabihas in Homs.
In Tartous, there was an undeniable air of exasperation and impatience with Assad. On numerous occasions, I heard pining for the perceived wisdom and experience of the father Hafiz, whom it was felt would never have allowed things to reach the stage they did. The regime’s supporters want someone to execute the war efficiently and win it decisively, something Bashar has utterly failed to do despite massive foreign backing from Hizbollah, Iran and Russia.
As the war grinds on, there is an increasing sense of anger towards a man many see as being out of his depths. Whereas Winston Churchill would be out and about visiting parts of the UK hit by Germany bombing raids, Bashar’s continued isolation and seclusion from the world outside of Damascus, is as much about protecting him from his own Alawites as it is from attempts on his life by the opposition.
Of course the Geneva talks failed! Waleed Muallem and Buthaina Shaaban et al would have been lynched by the regime’s own supporters among the delegation if they had uttered so much as a compromising word, let alone discussed any deal to transition to shared power. One does not share power with “takfiris”. In the absence of a clear and decisive military victory by one side over the other, the only way to end the war in Syria would have been a political settlement. Both are outcomes Bashar Assad cannot possibly deliver on. Trapped by his own rhetoric, he is doomed to continue pursuing a course of action which has no hope of ending in a triumph for the regime.
As Alawites continue to die in their thousands, expended by a president who regards them as expendable as rounds of ammunition or liters of tank fuel, as increasingly barbaric barrel bombings and starvation tactics fail to bring the rest of the country under heel once again, Assad’s position will become increasingly untenable among his own constituency.
Failing to deliver on a military victory, and unable to take any steps towards a political settlement, his ability to exert control over elements within his own regime will continue to be undermined. Today, he can’t even deliver a prisoner alive and well to a friendly pro-Iranian British MP, or ensure the safety of a UN aid convoy. In the not too distant future, his inability to influence events will become clearer and more apparent, until his very life will be in danger from those closest to him, looking to replace him with someone who in their view can execute the war more efficiently, and not pussyfoot about unleashing every single drop of chemicals in the regime’s arsenal. The regime’s supporters haven’t died in such numbers only to share power with perceived “takfiris”. “Kess em el doktor Bashar” indeed.
Assad today is a liability, to both his own constituents, the country in opposition to him, and to the region as a whole. His room for political maneuver is almost non-existent, his ability to deliver a military victory completely impossible. Unable to bring the war to a conclusion, incapable of orchestrating a decisive victory in any shape, way or form, the most extreme elements among the regime will dispose of him. Assad’s own rhetoric has made his demise at the hands of his own Alawites inevitable.
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