The Syrian civil war, by far the most merciless in the 21st century, may have at times appeared surreal to those of us who write about conflict in the region, but the suffering it has caused to millions of Syrians has been real indeed, leaving scars on those who survived it that will never heal.
The coming showdown between allied forces and rebel fighters — a planned offensive by the former that recently was all but advertised on billboards — may turn out to be the last hurrah for an uprising whose supporters rose up more than seven years ago demanding social justice and regime change. The human cost of the war that followed was staggering, while its strategic impact for Syria and for the entire Arab region is yet to be discerned.
But clearly our immediate concern is the humanitarian calamity that will attend this impending showdown, “a perfect storm coming up in front of our eyes”, as Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, called it. American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, writing on Twitter last Friday, said simply: “The world is watching”. What the world is likely to watch will not be pretty — not by a stretch.
Idlib province, in the northwest of the country, is the eye of the storm, as it were, where thousands of rebel fighters blend together, like the proverbial “fish in water”, with three million civilians, many internally displaced refugees. Along the province’s southern borders, the Syrian Army has deployed massive ground forces and dozens of armoured units poised to attack. And Russia, whose role in the war has been key to the regime’s survival, stepped up its rhetoric about what it intends to do in Idlib.
Its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, minced no words. He said, menacingly, referring to the armed militants, that “terrorists must be wiped out”, accusing them, improbably, of preparing to use chemical weapons. He even, in a further flight of fancy, claimed that first responders, known as the White Helmets, had “kidnapped 44 children to facilitate such an attack”. (The claim becomes more laughable when you consider that the rebels have neither the sophisticated storage facilities nor the expertise to use chemical weapons.) Never mind the absurdity inherent in such rhetoric. But in Russia’s use of diplomatic idiom and metaphor, much as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”.
Russia is not only escalating its rhetoric, on the eve of the Idlib assault, but is preparing to intervene with formidable firepower. “The escalation is all on Russia’s side”, reported the Guardian last week. “It is assembling a naval armada off the Syrian coast, comprising 25 ships, combat aircraft and the missile cruiser Marshall Uskinov — the biggest show of force since Putin intervened in Syria in 2015, The fleet is ostensibly engaged in exercises, but Dimitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, admitted drills were directly linked to Idlib, which he termed a “terrorist stronghold that must be tackled soon”.
All of which brings us — those of us who recall the horrors of Aleppo and Ghouta, where civilians always got the bad end of the stick — to the unspeakable agony of having to contemplate the fate awaiting those three million innocent souls caught in Idlib. Having fled from every corner of the country, where do they now go when regime forces and, more vulnerably, when Russian bombers, start their blitz?
And when Russians start a blitz, they do so with no holds barred and no concerns for human life — and not just in Aleppo and Ghouta, where they proved their mettle. Recall here, if you please, what this Russian firepower, unleashed on populated areas, did in the mid-1990s to Grozny, Chechnya’s once attractive, rustic capital city of 400,000, which was reduced to rubble, reduced to a smashed, smouldering husk reminiscent of Hiroshima.
Where then, one wants to ask, will hundreds of thousands of refugees from Idlib — men, women and children, harried and beaten, as refugees fleeing violence are wont to be — seek sanctuary once hostilities start? It is not known whether a refugee exodus towards Turkey’s tightly sealed border, in the so called Euphrates Shield Zone, a mere swath of Syrian land that Turkey has controlled over the last 18 months, will be allowed
And the UN, which really has little leverage in this case over decisions made by Ankara, has not the infrastructure in place to receive a massive flow of suffering humanity. As a senior aid worker put it, “Sending people there will only move the catastrophe from one area to another,
In the end, what we’re looking at here is that the regime’s pre-eminent goal is to see a return to the status quo ante in Syria (as if 400,000 Syrians have not been sent to their graves, 11 million have not fled home and homeland, and a “lost generation” is not today wandering the face of the earth in search of asylum) where Bashar Al Assad is reinstated as the country’s supreme dictator who will demand, and expect to get, an elegiac devotion to his person and unquestioned submission to his rule.
And, beyond its implications for ordinary Syrians, return to the status quo ante will seal both Russia’s strategic victory over the US and cement Iran’s strategic ambitions in the Middle East, sending a message to the West to keep out of Syria, now a full-fledged part of Moscow’s and Tehran’s sphere of influence.
An opposition leader in Idlib, who gave his name as Munaf Al Shami, expressing the despair, not so much of his fellow militants — who now feel cornered, with impossible odds against their survival, let alone victory — but of the Syrian people at large, was quoted in the Guardian last week saying, a touch forlornly, “We are at the mercy of powers that are much larger than us. This is a game we cannot influence. It’s much larger than the blood of the people and the soil it seeps into”.
Pity the nation, I say, pity the nation as you pray.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
