A Humanitarian Crisis: The Syrian Civil War, by Adam Janmohamed
I had every intention of writing a completely objective article about the political situation in Syria. However, having spent the past few months in Beirut and witnessing some of the effects of the war happening just across the border, I find this nigh on impossible. Most of the Arabic-speaking friends I have met out here are Syrian refugees forced to leave their home and find work in neighbouring Lebanon. I’ll give just two examples. Mahmoud, a twenty-four year old man, and Dirar, a thirty five year old man, who work twelve hour shifts seven days a week in a clothes shop just across the road from me. After countless coffees and football games with these two men I’m beginning to know them quite well. Dirar tells me he was a successful and well-established businessman back in Damascus who earned more in an hour than he does for a full day’s work here in Beirut. He was always opposed to the Assad regime but got on with his daily life without much care for politics. This changed with the Assad led crackdown on the revolution. According to what he told me the regime began to look for any excuse to incriminate anyone in the population who could possibly be against the regime. Dirar was arrested for smoking in the mall that he owned and imprisoned with his two brothers for ten days. He felt he had no choice but to leave his livelihood and flee to Lebanon. Mahmoud is a father of two and just like Dirar he was forced to leave his homeland because of the political situation, he now shares a room with five other Syrian men and hasn’t seen his children since. You would not be foolish to think that I would therefore argue that the West should have intervened in Syria, you would, however, be incorrect.
It’s easy to distance oneself from the opening statement because of the clinical almost dehumanized nature of the words “a series of chemical attacks”. Let’s be clear, this was a cold-blooded war crime that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent people
While it is hard to know exactly what is going on amidst the destitution and destruction in Syria, one thing we do know is that on August 21st 2013 a series of chemical attacks took place in the suburbs of Damascus. It’s easy to distance oneself from the opening statement because of the clinical almost dehumanized nature of the words “a series of chemical attacks”. Let’s be clear, this was a cold-blooded war crime that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent people. On the eve of the attacks, these people would have been, despite the pressure of war, doing their best to go about their daily business, and live a normal life. The shell hit at 5am so as to maximise its effects, cold air prevented the sarin gas from rising. Some will have died in their sleep others will have woken up to the chaotic effects of the gas, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters frothing and drooling from their mouths, convulsing and twitching in pain and ultimately row upon row of lifeless bundles of white cloth, many no longer than a foot or two. A harrowing image, a testimony to the atrocity of war and above all, its injustice. And so it is not only understandable but also commendable for the world to want to help these innocent victims of the war but military intervention would have been nothing short of egoistic bravura from the West.
The UN report commissioned by Ban Ki Moon contains video evidence, social networking accounts, eye-witness testimonies and most importantly of all, launch site coordinates that point an ever-increasingly defiant finger towards the Syrian army and its marrionettiste Mr. Assad. Add to this the fact that one of the key pieces of evidence that the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cited in defence of the Syrian regime, was the video analysis of a Lebanese nun with no apparent connection to the attacks, who simply had an unjustified hunch that the footage was fake. Days after the attack, Mr Assad’s and Mr Putin’s governments fervently denied even the premise that a chemical weapons attack had taken place and now, after definitive proof, continue to contest its culpability. Taking into account all of these facts, the perpetrators of the attack become undisputable. My point? There is no lack of evidence; we know who was behind those attacks so the “we must learn from Iraq” argument, the argument that we do not have sufficient evidence for intervention, is completely redundant.
So if it is clear who committed this atrocity and if it is agreed upon that it is a war crime and as such a violation of international law, then why should we not intervene?
Both Mr Obama and Mr Cameron failed to convince their respective parliaments that military intervention was the right course of action. Mr Obama could not convince a country already war tired from Middle Eastern interventions that action in Syria would be beneficial. People did not believe the situation had changed considerably but instead that Obama was solely trying to save his skin after his “red line” rhetoric slip up. Across the pond, Mr Cameron became the first British prime minister in history to lose a parliamentary vote on war. Neither of these leaders had an answer to the obvious question. What next? Did they have any sort of exit strategy that would ensure an avoidance of Libya style chaos? Would Syria really be a democratic country after the fall of the regime, or would it share a similar fate to Egypt? Would a rebel win really mean both a more secure Middle East and better relations with the West?
The UN report commissioned by Ban Ki Moon contains video evidence, social networking accounts, eye-witness testimonies and most importantly of all, launch site coordinates that point an ever-increasingly defiant finger towards the Syrian army and its marrionettiste Mr. Assad. Add to this the fact that one of the key pieces of evidence that the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cited in defence of the Syrian regime, was the video analysis of a Lebanese nun with no apparent connection to the attacks, who simply had an unjustified hunch that the footage was fake. Days after the attack, Mr Assad’s and Mr Putin’s governments fervently denied even the premise that a chemical weapons attack had taken place and now, after definitive proof, continue to contest its culpability. Taking into account all of these facts, the perpetrators of the attack become undisputable. My point? There is no lack of evidence; we know who was behind those attacks so the “we must learn from Iraq” argument, the argument that we do not have sufficient evidence for intervention, is completely redundant.
So if it is clear who committed this atrocity and if it is agreed upon that it is a war crime and as such a violation of international law, then why should we not intervene?
Both Mr Obama and Mr Cameron failed to convince their respective parliaments that military intervention was the right course of action. Mr Obama could not convince a country already war tired from Middle Eastern interventions that action in Syria would be beneficial. People did not believe the situation had changed considerably but instead that Obama was solely trying to save his skin after his “red line” rhetoric slip up. Across the pond, Mr Cameron became the first British prime minister in history to lose a parliamentary vote on war. Neither of these leaders had an answer to the obvious question. What next? Did they have any sort of exit strategy that would ensure an avoidance of Libya style chaos? Would Syria really be a democratic country after the fall of the regime, or would it share a similar fate to Egypt? Would a rebel win really mean both a more secure Middle East and better relations with the West?
While I don’t doubt that Mr. Assad and his government have and still are committing war crimes as I have already expressed, the biggest trap we can fall into is to romanticize the opposition
Firstly, one of the most frustrating things about the media coverage of the Syrian conflict is the child-like narrative of the war that we are presented with. As children, we all enjoyed stories with a clear division between good and evil and a didactic message, where a villain attacks a damsel in distress and is saved by a hero showing that we should always step in to save the day. As we progress in our childhood we grow out of these stories because we realise that this clear division is simply a romantic dream, an idealism; we begin to understand that not every narrative is as clear cut as good against evil and that there is a more complex nature to events. Unfortunately, the western media at the beginning of the Syrian crisis reported it in this appealing and yet juvenile approach. While I don’t doubt that Mr. Assad and his government have and still are committing war crimes as I have already expressed, the biggest trap we can fall into is to romanticize the opposition. There is no singular opposition, the rebels are composed of hundreds of insurgent groups and even by conservative American estimates, terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and Jabhat Al-Nusra make up at least twenty per cent of the opposition. A quick search on YouTube reveals footage of rebel road blocks between Jordan and Syria and Iraq and Syria. Men are taken out of their lorries and quizzed about their religion, if they are deemed to be Shiia (if they don’t know how many times you should kneel during prayer for example) they are simply taken to the side of the road and shot. Look to Tripoli in Lebanon, where rebel soldiers have made it their policy to shoot any Alawite they see in the legs or even to Beirut where an Al-Qaeda inspired terrorist cell bombed the Iranian embassy killing 25 innocent people and wounded over 200.
The trouble in Lebanon is not only an example of how brutal some of the rebels are but also how dedicated they are. It is testimony to how quickly the conflict can spill over international borders, practically overnight. The war in Syria isn’t solely a domestic war, it is a war that could change the entire landscape of the Middle East and the Muslim world. A win for the rebels could see the establishment of a Sunni independent state and leave Iran as the only Shiite state in the Middle East. With this in mind, Sunni men are coming from all over the world determined to sacrifice their lives. As the bomb in Beirut shows they will sacrifice others indiscriminately to achieve their goal. According to MI5, over 300 British men have travelled to Syria through illegal smuggling routes across the Turkish border. While these British Muslims represent a tiny minority, they are so engaged with the sectarian war that they are willing to give up their lives hundreds of miles away. It only takes one disillusioned and radicalized man to cause death and destruction to hundreds and there is no reason why it could not happen on British soil. It is important to know the risks of involvement, pick a side and you open the door to terrorism. The Iranian embassy in Beirut was attacked because Iran has picked a side and is supporting Assad. Britain must not do the same.
The testimonies of Dirar and Mahmoud are far from rare, according to the U.N humanitarian organisation, up to 8.3 million people, more than a third of Syria’s pre-war population, will have fled the country by the end of 2014. It is the worst humanitarian crisis since Rwanda and it shows no sign of improving. Whilst Mr Assad’s regime might be the greater of two evils, even some of the most prominent members of the original resistance agree that the best thing that could happen to Syria now is for Mr Assad to regain control and for an international push towards democracy to commence. A British and American war effort would not have made the lives of these men any better, it would have paved the way for an inward looking, radicalised and aggressive secular state and brought a serious security threat to our soil.
The trouble in Lebanon is not only an example of how brutal some of the rebels are but also how dedicated they are. It is testimony to how quickly the conflict can spill over international borders, practically overnight. The war in Syria isn’t solely a domestic war, it is a war that could change the entire landscape of the Middle East and the Muslim world. A win for the rebels could see the establishment of a Sunni independent state and leave Iran as the only Shiite state in the Middle East. With this in mind, Sunni men are coming from all over the world determined to sacrifice their lives. As the bomb in Beirut shows they will sacrifice others indiscriminately to achieve their goal. According to MI5, over 300 British men have travelled to Syria through illegal smuggling routes across the Turkish border. While these British Muslims represent a tiny minority, they are so engaged with the sectarian war that they are willing to give up their lives hundreds of miles away. It only takes one disillusioned and radicalized man to cause death and destruction to hundreds and there is no reason why it could not happen on British soil. It is important to know the risks of involvement, pick a side and you open the door to terrorism. The Iranian embassy in Beirut was attacked because Iran has picked a side and is supporting Assad. Britain must not do the same.
The testimonies of Dirar and Mahmoud are far from rare, according to the U.N humanitarian organisation, up to 8.3 million people, more than a third of Syria’s pre-war population, will have fled the country by the end of 2014. It is the worst humanitarian crisis since Rwanda and it shows no sign of improving. Whilst Mr Assad’s regime might be the greater of two evils, even some of the most prominent members of the original resistance agree that the best thing that could happen to Syria now is for Mr Assad to regain control and for an international push towards democracy to commence. A British and American war effort would not have made the lives of these men any better, it would have paved the way for an inward looking, radicalised and aggressive secular state and brought a serious security threat to our soil.