As fighting intensifies in the 27-month old Syrian conflict, showing no signs of letting up, the number of those affected and displaced continues to rise, and the atrocities become more brutal.
“Every time I speak about the humanitarian situation in Syria, I have to find more severe words to describe how badly it is escalating,” Radhouane Nouicer, the United Nations Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria, told Diplomatic Courier. “The most worrisome trend is the continuous deterioration.”
The fighting deepens as the balance of power ebbs and flows. In June Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies seized the rebel stronghold of Qusair, a key crossroads town connecting Damascus with western and northern Syria.
The onslaught was a serious blow to the rebels. It also raised concerns over the rise of Hezbollah fighters in the conflict and prompted action by the U.S., which had been weighing options about arming rebels in a lengthy internal debate.
After confirming the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, the White House said last week they had crossed a “red line” and agreed to then step up military aid to some of Syria's moderate rebel groups.
On Wednesday, the Daily Telegraph reported that the rebels received Russian-made “Konkurs” anti-tank missiles from Saudi Arabia—a chief ally of the U.S. in the Gulf—signaling that the unofficial embargo that was placed on allies against sending weapons has now been now lifted.
The announcement comes as Assad’s forces are reportedly preparing for a major offensive to retake the rebel-held northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its former commercial hub.
The UN claims that nearly 93,000 people, including 6,000 children, have already been killed since the civil war began. Only a year ago it estimated that 1 million people would need humanitarian assistance. Now it says that number has risen to 6.8 million, including 4.25 million internally displaced, and more than 1.6 million refugees.
The crisis threatens to undo two decades of Syrian development.
“If the conflict doesn’t stop, one can imagine where we would be a year from now,” Nouicer said. “It is simply a massive tragedy.”
In an unprecedented move, the UN launched the largest humanitarian appeal in its history, aiming to raise $4.4 billion in emergency assistance for what it estimates will be half of the Syrian population in need by the end of 2013. Its last appeal, for $1.5 billion in December 2012, was expected to carry through to mid-2013, but the spiraling violence has quickly outstripped these resources.
The spillover of Syrian refugees into Lebanon and Jordon has prompted those countries to seek $830 million from the UN. “This situation will be a protracted one…the humanitarian suffering resulting from the crisis will not go away [even] after the cessation of hostilities,” Noicier said. “The destruction and the displacement are massive. The trauma among children is so widespread, and the wounds are so deep.”
Harrowing Reports of Brutality
In late April researchers for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) visited the Syrian government’s former State Security and Military Intelligence facilities in the northern city of Raqqa, which local armed opposition groups seized in March and still control. Lama Fakih, one of the researchers, said they saw “hard evidence of both arbitrary detention and torture.” “Being inside the facilities gives another sense of reality to it: being able to go into the room where detainees were held, seeing the solitary-confinement cells, seeing the torture devices that were used on detainees, having detainees identify which rooms the torture took place in, and being in the offices where the former head of integration and the soldier barracks are in the facility,” Fakih told Diplomatic Courier.
Fakih said it is important to go on documenting abuses committed by both sides since the conflict began, and to “record and identify who the perpetrators are and what the violations are.”
Among the evidence collected was a “bsat al-reeh” torture device, which Fakih describes as a “human-sized crucifix that a detainee is tied to.” “The wooden cross folds in the middle, putting the detainee in a very difficult stress position,” she said. “It’s a device that they can use to both immobilize a detainee and to just harm the detainee by bending them in this very unnatural way.”
HRW issued its report in May, describing interviews with people previously held by the Military Intelligence in Raqqa. One such individual, named “Ziad,” born in 1964, reported that security forces detained him on April 12, 2012. According to HRW, he was beaten for providing relief assistance in Raqqa to displaced families from Homs, as well as for participating in demonstrations. Human rights monitors have long claimed that civilians have been detained unjustly and tortured, and that thousands have simply disappeared. The Syrian government has consistently denied these allegations.
HRW says that it has also documented crimes by the opposition, including extrajudicial executions, tortures, detentions, kidnappings, the use of child soldiers and attacks on religious sites. The Islamist rebel militia has faced growing criticism for its increasing atrocities, such as the purported execution of a 15-year-old boy for blasphemy, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A report released June 4th by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria calls attention to the “new levels of cruelty and brutality.”
HRW’s 29-page report, which covers the first five months of 2013, indicates that “war crimes, crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations continue apace.” It notes widespread attacks against civilians, murder and sexual violence, among other abuses. It says, however, that the violations committed by the opposition did not reach the same intensity and scale as those committed by the Assad regime.
The report also indicates that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that chemical agents have been used as weapons [but] that precise agents, delivery systems or perpetrators could not be identified.” The UN team examined four reported toxic attacks during the reporting period. Since the findings at the time were inconclusive, the UN called upon the Syrian government to give investigators full access to sites of concern.
Paulo Pinheiro, who chairs the UN commission, warned that Syria is in a “free-fall” and said that “brutality has become a tactic of war.”
A Splintered Nation
“It’s a conflict of many layers, very complicated,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, a U.S. think tank. He told Diplomatic Courier that Syria is being “broken apart into a kind of patchwork of areas and zones.”
Pro-democratic protests in 2011 against government repression and an unfair economic system initially set the stage for violence. The Assad regime’s brutal response to the protests caused Syrians to take up arms, escalating into a “shooting war,” Salem said.
“In that shooting war, sectarian and ethnic identities have come to the floor and morphed a little bit into a sectarian and ethnic civil war,” he said. Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, has been supported by minority groups such as Christians and Shiites. The majority of the Syrian population are Sunnis, including the rebel fighters.
Hezbollah’s role has allowed the Iran-backed Shiite movement to further aggravate longstanding religious rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites, which threaten to spill over into the wider region.
“The regime was struggling for a while, but in the last couple of months has gained some momentum,” Salem said. With no unified political or military leadership, Syria’s disparate rebel groups remain divided. Radical Islamist groups, namely the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, have taken the lead in the battlefield, proving to be the most effective fighters among the opposition forces.
“The opposition, one must say, is in pretty serious disarray,” Salem said, adding that “what is loosely called the opposition” is more splintered within the country than without, and between national secular positions and Islamist ones.
“There are armed groups and unarmed groups; and then there’s all the various little regions of Syria, where in each one there’s a little militia running its own show—so it’s a very, very splintered reality, and it’s very difficult to imagine that from a splintered reality you can create a unified institution,” Salem said.
After the loss of Qusair, the opposition, outgunned, pleaded for weapons from Western governments.
The Obama administration has been reluctant to arm the rebels because they have increasingly extremist elements and backing. But Hezbollah’s growing involvement has prompted quicker action.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, said in a telephone conference call with reporters that the White House now has “high confidence” that the Assad regime “used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”
According to intelligence agency estimates, 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons use, Rhodes said.
The use of chemical weapons, Rhodes said, has “led us to increase both the scope and scale of the assistance that we’re providing to the opposition, including direct support to the Syrian Military Council (SMC), the military option on the ground.” He emphasized that the Obama administration’s goal is to bring about a “negotiated political settlement.”
Diplomacy, meanwhile, remains elusive and doubt hangs over the upcoming peace talks co-sponsored by the U.S. and Russia, dubbed “Geneva II.” The talks follow on last year’s attempt to end the violence. Heightened tension and frustration on both sides of the conflict prevented the talks from being held in May. As opposition leaders remain spilt, debate over who will attend has become a deciding factor.
“I think the crisis is not at all yet ‘ripe,’ as they say, for an actual conference,” said Salem. “The conference can be useful in at least focusing attention on deciding on humanitarian aid, maybe focusing on trying to get a ceasefire and some limited gains, but the idea that there could be some major political breakthrough in the next weeks or even months is very unrealistic."
Tracy Lee is a freelance journalist currently traveling in South America. She was previously a UN correspondent for China’s global news agency Xinhua, covering events ranging from Palestine’s UN Membership bid to the Arab Spring, as well as reporting daily on the UN Security Council, General Assembly and peacekeeping operations. She has written in-depth humanitarian stories on children caught in the crossfire during the Libyan civil war, and on the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and communication.
Photo: Freedom House (cc).
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Embroiled in Conflict, Syria Sinks Deeper into Massive Humanitarian Disaster
June 25, 2013
As fighting intensifies in the 27-month old Syrian conflict, showing no signs of letting up, the number of those affected and displaced continues to rise, and the atrocities become more brutal.
“Every time I speak about the humanitarian situation in Syria, I have to find more severe words to describe how badly it is escalating,” Radhouane Nouicer, the United Nations Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria, told Diplomatic Courier. “The most worrisome trend is the continuous deterioration.”
The fighting deepens as the balance of power ebbs and flows. In June Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies seized the rebel stronghold of Qusair, a key crossroads town connecting Damascus with western and northern Syria.
The onslaught was a serious blow to the rebels. It also raised concerns over the rise of Hezbollah fighters in the conflict and prompted action by the U.S., which had been weighing options about arming rebels in a lengthy internal debate.
After confirming the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, the White House said last week they had crossed a “red line” and agreed to then step up military aid to some of Syria's moderate rebel groups.
On Wednesday, the Daily Telegraph reported that the rebels received Russian-made “Konkurs” anti-tank missiles from Saudi Arabia—a chief ally of the U.S. in the Gulf—signaling that the unofficial embargo that was placed on allies against sending weapons has now been now lifted.
The announcement comes as Assad’s forces are reportedly preparing for a major offensive to retake the rebel-held northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its former commercial hub.
The UN claims that nearly 93,000 people, including 6,000 children, have already been killed since the civil war began. Only a year ago it estimated that 1 million people would need humanitarian assistance. Now it says that number has risen to 6.8 million, including 4.25 million internally displaced, and more than 1.6 million refugees.
The crisis threatens to undo two decades of Syrian development.
“If the conflict doesn’t stop, one can imagine where we would be a year from now,” Nouicer said. “It is simply a massive tragedy.”
In an unprecedented move, the UN launched the largest humanitarian appeal in its history, aiming to raise $4.4 billion in emergency assistance for what it estimates will be half of the Syrian population in need by the end of 2013. Its last appeal, for $1.5 billion in December 2012, was expected to carry through to mid-2013, but the spiraling violence has quickly outstripped these resources.
The spillover of Syrian refugees into Lebanon and Jordon has prompted those countries to seek $830 million from the UN. “This situation will be a protracted one…the humanitarian suffering resulting from the crisis will not go away [even] after the cessation of hostilities,” Noicier said. “The destruction and the displacement are massive. The trauma among children is so widespread, and the wounds are so deep.”
Harrowing Reports of Brutality
In late April researchers for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) visited the Syrian government’s former State Security and Military Intelligence facilities in the northern city of Raqqa, which local armed opposition groups seized in March and still control. Lama Fakih, one of the researchers, said they saw “hard evidence of both arbitrary detention and torture.” “Being inside the facilities gives another sense of reality to it: being able to go into the room where detainees were held, seeing the solitary-confinement cells, seeing the torture devices that were used on detainees, having detainees identify which rooms the torture took place in, and being in the offices where the former head of integration and the soldier barracks are in the facility,” Fakih told Diplomatic Courier.
Fakih said it is important to go on documenting abuses committed by both sides since the conflict began, and to “record and identify who the perpetrators are and what the violations are.”
Among the evidence collected was a “bsat al-reeh” torture device, which Fakih describes as a “human-sized crucifix that a detainee is tied to.” “The wooden cross folds in the middle, putting the detainee in a very difficult stress position,” she said. “It’s a device that they can use to both immobilize a detainee and to just harm the detainee by bending them in this very unnatural way.”
HRW issued its report in May, describing interviews with people previously held by the Military Intelligence in Raqqa. One such individual, named “Ziad,” born in 1964, reported that security forces detained him on April 12, 2012. According to HRW, he was beaten for providing relief assistance in Raqqa to displaced families from Homs, as well as for participating in demonstrations. Human rights monitors have long claimed that civilians have been detained unjustly and tortured, and that thousands have simply disappeared. The Syrian government has consistently denied these allegations.
HRW says that it has also documented crimes by the opposition, including extrajudicial executions, tortures, detentions, kidnappings, the use of child soldiers and attacks on religious sites. The Islamist rebel militia has faced growing criticism for its increasing atrocities, such as the purported execution of a 15-year-old boy for blasphemy, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A report released June 4th by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria calls attention to the “new levels of cruelty and brutality.”
HRW’s 29-page report, which covers the first five months of 2013, indicates that “war crimes, crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations continue apace.” It notes widespread attacks against civilians, murder and sexual violence, among other abuses. It says, however, that the violations committed by the opposition did not reach the same intensity and scale as those committed by the Assad regime.
The report also indicates that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that chemical agents have been used as weapons [but] that precise agents, delivery systems or perpetrators could not be identified.” The UN team examined four reported toxic attacks during the reporting period. Since the findings at the time were inconclusive, the UN called upon the Syrian government to give investigators full access to sites of concern.
Paulo Pinheiro, who chairs the UN commission, warned that Syria is in a “free-fall” and said that “brutality has become a tactic of war.”
A Splintered Nation
“It’s a conflict of many layers, very complicated,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, a U.S. think tank. He told Diplomatic Courier that Syria is being “broken apart into a kind of patchwork of areas and zones.”
Pro-democratic protests in 2011 against government repression and an unfair economic system initially set the stage for violence. The Assad regime’s brutal response to the protests caused Syrians to take up arms, escalating into a “shooting war,” Salem said.
“In that shooting war, sectarian and ethnic identities have come to the floor and morphed a little bit into a sectarian and ethnic civil war,” he said. Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, has been supported by minority groups such as Christians and Shiites. The majority of the Syrian population are Sunnis, including the rebel fighters.
Hezbollah’s role has allowed the Iran-backed Shiite movement to further aggravate longstanding religious rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites, which threaten to spill over into the wider region.
“The regime was struggling for a while, but in the last couple of months has gained some momentum,” Salem said. With no unified political or military leadership, Syria’s disparate rebel groups remain divided. Radical Islamist groups, namely the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, have taken the lead in the battlefield, proving to be the most effective fighters among the opposition forces.
“The opposition, one must say, is in pretty serious disarray,” Salem said, adding that “what is loosely called the opposition” is more splintered within the country than without, and between national secular positions and Islamist ones.
“There are armed groups and unarmed groups; and then there’s all the various little regions of Syria, where in each one there’s a little militia running its own show—so it’s a very, very splintered reality, and it’s very difficult to imagine that from a splintered reality you can create a unified institution,” Salem said.
After the loss of Qusair, the opposition, outgunned, pleaded for weapons from Western governments.
The Obama administration has been reluctant to arm the rebels because they have increasingly extremist elements and backing. But Hezbollah’s growing involvement has prompted quicker action.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, said in a telephone conference call with reporters that the White House now has “high confidence” that the Assad regime “used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”
According to intelligence agency estimates, 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons use, Rhodes said.
The use of chemical weapons, Rhodes said, has “led us to increase both the scope and scale of the assistance that we’re providing to the opposition, including direct support to the Syrian Military Council (SMC), the military option on the ground.” He emphasized that the Obama administration’s goal is to bring about a “negotiated political settlement.”
Diplomacy, meanwhile, remains elusive and doubt hangs over the upcoming peace talks co-sponsored by the U.S. and Russia, dubbed “Geneva II.” The talks follow on last year’s attempt to end the violence. Heightened tension and frustration on both sides of the conflict prevented the talks from being held in May. As opposition leaders remain spilt, debate over who will attend has become a deciding factor.
“I think the crisis is not at all yet ‘ripe,’ as they say, for an actual conference,” said Salem. “The conference can be useful in at least focusing attention on deciding on humanitarian aid, maybe focusing on trying to get a ceasefire and some limited gains, but the idea that there could be some major political breakthrough in the next weeks or even months is very unrealistic."
Tracy Lee is a freelance journalist currently traveling in South America. She was previously a UN correspondent for China’s global news agency Xinhua, covering events ranging from Palestine’s UN Membership bid to the Arab Spring, as well as reporting daily on the UN Security Council, General Assembly and peacekeeping operations. She has written in-depth humanitarian stories on children caught in the crossfire during the Libyan civil war, and on the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and communication.
Photo: Freedom House (cc).
