Brief notes on Syria

Syria has become an unimaginable disaster over the course of four and a half years of the civil war. The international community must do everything it can to deal with it, in the hope that the crisis has not reached unmanageable proportions.

The Syrian war is terrible enough but to make matters worse, the UN’s humanitarian agencies have recently said that they were on the verge of bankruptcy, due to the numbers of people that need their help; four million Syrians alone are either displaced or refugees.

As for the events on the ground, there is a new player in the conflict. Russia has launched air strikes in Syria, but it is not clear whether they were aimed at the Islamic State (IS) fighters – which is what the Western powers have been doing – or the opposition forces fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This is clearly something that could impede possible partnership between Russia and the West in Syria.

At the UN General Assembly session it became apparent that there is significant disagreement over how to tackle the crisis. While US and France insisted that Mr. Al-Assad had to go, Russia said that it would be a grave mistake to dismantle the regime in Damascus and not concentrate on defeating IS. The United Kingdom was willing to consider Mr. al-Assad staying temporarily in power as part of transition. The leaders eventually agreed to work towards a diplomatic end to the war, but this is the least they could have done.

The question of how to deal with the Syrian crisis is obviously immensely complicated. Some things, however, should be easy enough to observe and act upon accordingly. There needs to be a concerted effort to protect Syrian civilians and punish, by overwhelming military force, those who target them, whoever they may be. Furthermore, there is something on which all sides agree – they want IS defeated and eliminated from Syria. This should therefore be the first thing that the ‘allies’ do (by the way, it is a shame that the Arab League countries and Turkey are not more involved). Once the IS is effectively out of the way, the diplomatic process should commence. It is imperative that all war crimes are documented and punished, which will almost certainly exclude Mr. al-Assad and rebel leaders from playing part in the country’s future. As such people are loath to relinquish power, it is going to be a long and delicate process.

Overall, the Syrian crisis must be tackled in all its complexity. This will require a mixture of rapid, targeted and decisive use of military force, as well as painstaking diplomacy. There must be a credible peace process, to be followed by reconstruction and the return to some kind of, as yet unknown, normality. However difficult this may seem – and it is – the objective of stopping the bloodshed and protecting millions of innocent Syrians must not be abandoned.

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