Syria

Overview of the crisis in Syria

The war in Syria has killed more than 400,000 people and displaced 12 million, forcing more than 4 million to flee the country since 2011. The UN has called it “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our era.”

In the context of the Arab Spring uprisings, Syrians rose up in March of 2011 to call for the end of dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has continued the brutality of his father Hafez al-Assad’s rule, begun in 1971. The uprising was, and continues to be, violently repressed by the Assad regime.

The Syrian government has used highly destructive barrel bombs, chemical weapons, siege and starvation as tools of war against their own people, and have prevented access to humanitarian relief. In addition to the Bashar al-Assad regime’s crimes against humanity, the war now also involves a host of regional, sectarian, and global actors all fighting their own wars, including the United States, Russia, Iran, Al Nusra Front and ISIS.

There is an urgent need for serious engagement by the international community to end the war in a manner that respects the demands of the Syrian people instead of the various parties pushing their own geopolitical and sectarian agendas.

2017 Roundtable discussion on Syria

The War

As the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura said, it is “totally unacceptable that the Syrian airforce attacks its own territory in an indiscriminate way, killing its own citizens. The use of barrel bombs must stop. All evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of the civilian victims in the Syrian conflict have been caused by the use of such indiscriminate aerial weapons.”

Many assume that ISIS is committing the war crimes driving Syrians from their homes, but the truth is that the vast majority of Syrian civilians killed — more than 95% according to human rights groups — have been killed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The United States bears no small responsibility. The Syrian war — and particularly the rise of ISIS — has everything to do with U.S. actions dating back to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which gave rise to ISIS in the first place. Even now the U.S. airstrikes in Syria and neighboring Iraq are escalating the war in both places.

ENDING THE REFUGEE CRISIS

At least 4 million Syrians have fled their homeland since 2011, while millions more are internally displaced. Most refugees have gone to neighboring countries.

The EU prevents the vast majority of Syrians displaced by the war from applying for asylum from countries close to home, which necessitates the perilous journeys refugees are taking to reach EU territory in order to gain asylum.

Meanwhile, just under 2,200 Syrian refugees were allowed into the United States in 2015, a number that reached still a mere 10,000 in 2016.

As poet Warsan Shire has said, “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”: this devastating and urgent refugee crisis is a humanitarian disaster grown from the deeper political disaster of the war in Syria.

Ending the refugee crisis must start with freedom and justice in Syria.

Connections with Palestine/Israel

Palestinian refugees in Syria, long awaiting return to Palestine, are now refugees once more. They are barred from entering any of Syria’s neighboring countries except Turkey, and if they do make it, they face rejection from refugee camps, humanitarian organizations, and likely deportation back into the Syria they fled.

The Yarmouk refugee camp was once home to nearly 200,000 Palestinians. Yarmouk has been under attack and siege by the Assad regime since 2012. Its population has been decimated as tens of thousands have fled to escape barrel bombs, arrests, and a devastating siege. Now, only 18,000 people remain in Yarmouk.

Although the Assad regime has cast itself as a cornerstone in the Arab axis of resistance to Israel, it has in fact had a very cozy relationship with both the US and Israel: for example bombing Iraq in 1991 and sponsoring attacks on Palestinians during the Lebanon war.

In Their Own Words: Four residents of Yarmouk speak

Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles Back Into Syria

Israel cannot turn a blind eye to worldwide refugee crisis

Palestinians to UN: Push Israel Into Letting in Refugees From Syria

Palestine and the Syrian Revolution

Yarmouk Refugee Camp and the Syrian Uprising: A View from Within

The Death of Palestine: Two Years of Siege in Yarmouk

The Palestinians Fleeing Syria Are Among the Most Vulnerable Refugees