SYRIA: Power Games and Utter Indifference to a veritable HELL ON EARTH

The announcement this past week that US President Donald Trump would freeze an already paltry 200 million dollars in additional aid funds that were to be used for recovery efforts in Syria would appear to make clear his administration’s complete lack of empathy for the people of that war-ravaged country. The additional funding had been announced during a Middle East diplomatic trip in February by former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump would unceremoniously sack via Twitter shortly afterward.
Trump last week told a crowd of his supporters that the US would be leaving Syria “like, very soon” and said that it would be other countries’ job “to take care of it” from now on. This was not inconsistent with Trump’s stance on Syria prior to his election at the end of 2016, when he said that he thought a good solution would be to let Russia handle it. There can be little doubt that Russia is “handling it” by materially and militarily aiding and abetting the Syrian regime in perpetrating war crimes and mass slaughter against the very people that it rules.
That said, the fact is that US presence will probably not be terribly missed in Syria. Up to now, Washington’s attitude toward the horrendous war that has been raging there without respite for the past seven years has been lukewarm at best.

Even ostensible US invention in failed peace efforts under the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was less than hearty and quickly gave way to an apparent desire to tread lightly around Russia and to avoid helping rebels attempting to overthrow the pro-Russian regime there, rather than seeking to protect the most vulnerable victims of that conflict, innocent Syrians on whom the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad is raining down a living hell of fire and fury.
The fear of the West that jihadist groups fighting Assad could end up being even more anti-Western than the current regime is behind their apparent indifference to the horrific plight of the Syrian people. Nobody but Putin among world leaders wants Assad in power but the rebels fighting him are an unknown factor. Assad at least pays lip-service to the idea of a modern, secular—albeit dictatorial—Syria, rather than a radical fundamentalist regime, and Russia will make sure that he sticks to that policy since Moscow doesn’t want to have to deal with the whims of an Islamist theocracy either. So Assad has the unconditional support of Putin (and his UN veto) and has garnered the tacit preference of the West, despite pseudo-humanitarian chest-beating to the contrary.

Trump’s own 2017 attack on a Syrian air base—in which 59 Tomahawk missiles worth 100 million dollars (half the amount of the Syria recovery funds that the Trump administration is now cutting) were launched from a US naval vessel in retaliation for one of many chemical warfare attacks that Assad has ordered against his own people—was, as it turned out, largely a media fireworks show that hasn’t been repeated since, despite continuing gross human rights violations and war crimes being committed by Assad and foreign forces backing his nefarious regime.
Furthermore, what Western intervention that there has been in Syria—whether direct or through regional surrogates—has mostly been aimed at destroying ISIL, the worldwide Islamist terror organization that Washington had long seen as the number one threat to US security. Precious little of what the US has done in that war has had anything to do with shielding the Syrian people from the inhuman violence being waged against them by their own authoritarian government with the indispensable help of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
More specifically, Washington’s fight against ISIL in Syria is considered by the current administration to be basically over. Even if efforts to destroy the last pockets of ISIL resistance have not so far met with success, the US-led coalition fighting there has, indeed, taken back most of the positions that ISIL once held, and it apparently seems clear to the current Trump team that if Russia hopes to keep Bashar al-Assad in power, the ragged remains of the ISIL combat groups still in Syria will have to be dealt with, if not by Damascus, then more than likely by Moscow in order for the dictatorship to prevail. So the only thing Washington and the West as a whole need to do in order to declare their role in the Syrian tragedy finished, is to celebrate the “win” over ISIL and look the other way as Assad, with the help of his Russian cohorts, continues to murder and maim innocent men, women and children by the thousands in that nation, where the war has so far claimed nearly half a million lives.

No sooner had the US president announced that he was stepping back from Syria than Russia, Iran and Turkey let it be known that they would seek to broker “peace” in Syria. It should be pointed out once again the only goal of Russia in Syria is to keep Assad in power, since Assad protects and enables Russian interests in the region. But it is worth noting too that the Iranian government has also long backed the Assad regime, finances Hezbollah guerrillas that are a major pro-Assad force in the war and that, while Turkey is ostensibly opposed to Assad, it has long been maneuvering around its US ally in order to attack Kurdish forces fiercely opposing both ISIL and Assad in Syria, since it considers the Kurds to be enemies of the Turkish state. Seen in this way, it is hard to imagine how any action that these three countries might take will lead to any sort of peace except one in which the Assad regime remains in power and his opponents end up being crushed in a war that will continue to generate overwhelming collateral damage.

Clearly, there can be no doubt that the innocent civilians of Syria—the ones remaining there, since the fighting has given rise to an exodus of more than 5 million refugees and of some 6 million homeless migrants—find themselves trapped in what has become a living hell, a term that is clearly more literal than figurative. The devastation wreaked by the war is obvious. Nowhere in the country is there anywhere in which entire neighborhoods or entire cities have not been reduced to rubble. The extent of the humanitarian crisis bred by the war is mind-boggling and there is no sign of peace in sight.
Like the Rwanda genocide before it, the war in Syria is a humanitarian horror show in which a common world front to save an entire people from mass violence and murder is conspicuous by its absence. The major powers have forsaken the Syrian people in pursuit of their own geopolitical interests, while dogged Russian diplomatic resistance has tied the hands of the United Nations.
Emboldened by Western indifference and Russian collaboration, Bashar al-Assad has renewed and heightened his cold-blooded campaign of murder and mayhem against his own people in recent weeks, as the world looks on and does less than nothing, and while the neighborhoods where Syrian men, women and children once thrived have become the blood-soaked battlegrounds for a super-power proxy war and for a regional power war of attrition that seems to know no end. As such, Syria has become yet another ugly blot on the history of humanitarian intervention, and an indictment of shame against world leaders as a whole.