Politico
Last month, a convoy of aid trucks reached Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, where an estimated 8,000 residents and 1,000 rebel fighters have been slowly starving for four years. Before the Syrian civil war started, Daraya had a population of almost 80,000. But that was before Bashar Assad’s troops encircled the town and his planes began the daily bombardments that have reduced much of the city to rubble and devastated the wheat fields and farmlands that once sustained it. Many who are left in Daraya subsist on grass and grape leaves, whatever they can forage.
The United Nations has been trying to get food through for a while now, but Assad has blocked it every time. On this occasion, for no stated reason, he waved the U.N. through. When the trucks finally reached the center of Daraya, they were swarmed by desperate people, who quickly became angered when they realized the trucks were packed with mostly inedible things like mosquito nets and anti-lice shampoo.
Ten days later, the U.N. sent another convoy. This one, at least, was carrying food, though it wasn’t sufficient to feed everyone. But it was enough for U.N. officials to claim that they had tried. One senior U.N. official, off the record, told me wearily that it was “impossible to get the numbers right of how many people are actually inside.” This fatalist excuse roughly translates as: People are going to starve, but there’s nothing more to do.
As soon as the aid convoy left the town, the barrel bombs started again. Twenty-eight of them, by the count of Ahmad, a 23-year-old former engineering student, whom I spoke to by Skype Messenger. Ahmad works as a volunteer in the “media center” in Daraya. I asked him if he had gotten any of the 480 rations of food.
“No, I have not eaten today,” he told me. “I don’t understand how the world can watch this,” he said. “We’re starving.”
The truth is that the world, at least much of the United States, is not watching.
For Americans, caught up in a circus-like presidential election driven by fear and anger—about lost jobs, about terrorist attacks, about immigrants—Syria is simply part of an indefinite mass of Middle Eastern chaos and danger. Though Syria has endured five years of war, and suffered more than 400,000 dead, it manages to arouse as much suspicion as pity. And when it has been discussed at all by presidential candidates often it has been to argue over the need for an immigration ban on all Muslims to prevent terrorists from hiding among the trickle of Syrians entering the country. No one talks about Daraya, or the 18 other besieged towns across Syria just like it where starvation is being used as a tool of war.
The ordeal of Daraya exemplifies how we have gotten everything wrong about Syria. Daraya is suffering because the U.N. and Western countries like the United States cannot act effectively in concert, cannot manage to compel Assad to do anything he says he will do. Beginning last autumn and continuing through early this year, the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), the 17-nation group plus the European Union and U.N., convened in Vienna and Geneva to help determine the future of Syria. The group issued a series of directives, most of them quite straightforward: Commit to a cease-fire and allow humanitarian aid to enter places like Daraya.
So far, Assad has violated every directive, with no consequences for his noncompliance. This demonstrates two things: the U.N., which has been attempting to mediate the peace talks for four years, has once again lost any credibility and that Assad is basically above the law. The question for the United States is what will the next president do about it?
Going by the sketchy and not always consistent ideas put forward by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive presidential nominees of their parties, it’s hard to believe the next occupant of the White House will make a measurable improvement. That said, there is some reason to believe either one of them could be far more aggressive than President Barack Obama, whose decision not to enforce his so-called red line on chemical weapons in 2013 and his general desire to get out of the Middle East has left him open to criticism that he pulled his punch on Syria.
Obama has consistently rejected direct strikes against the Syrian government, saying that “what we have learned over the last 10, 12, 13 years is that unless we can get the parties on the ground to agree to live together in some fashion, then no amount of U.S. military engagement will solve the problem.” And now the White House is proposing a plan that would strengthen military cooperation between the U.S. and Russia, which has been bombing targets inside Syria since September, to combat terrorist groups in Syria in exchange for Russia’s agreement to persuade the Assad regime to stop bombing U.S.-supported rebels like the ones holed up in Daraya. Whether Vladimir Putin would follow through on such a deal is something about which Syria experts express deep skepticism.
So what would Clinton and Trump do differently—if anything ?
“Under a Clinton administration, it's fair to assume there will be a move to discuss the establishment of safe zones, probably first in places away from Russian activities to avoid any potential confrontation,” Shadi Hamid, a senior analyst with the Brookings Institution, says. “Regardless of her own preferences, she'd be under pressure to distinguish herself from Obama on foreign policy, and Syria would make sense as the place to chart a new approach.”
The no-fly zone Clinton has called for in north Syria would provide a humanitarian safe-space that, in theory, would stem the tide of refugees fleeing for Europe. But Clinton, generally seen as more hawkish than Obama, has struggled to answer the difficult questions about how to implement it and enforce it. Would she commit ground troops, widely accepted as a logistical prerequisite? And would she be prepared for the U.S. to shoot down Russian jets that violated the airspace? Her answers about “deconflicting airspace” have sounded more wishful than anything.
Her answers about “deconflicting airspace” have sounded more wishful than anything.
Kim Ghattas, who wrote a biography of Clinton, The Secretary, says: “She will likely want to quickly signal to the Russians, but also the Iranians, that there is a new president in the (White House) who is ready to impose a price on Iran for its behavior in the region—at the risk of undermining the nuclear deal—and force a political settlement in Syria.”
But Ghattas says that a lot depends on what is actually happening inside Syria by the time she gets to the Oval Office. “Either way, her approach will be driven by her concerns about the vacuum that the U.S. leaves when it is not fully engaged in a situation or a region.”
And then there’s Trump.
The real estate mogul’s thoughts on Syria are in such conflict they ought to have their own no-fly zone. He has campaigned against foreign entanglements like the Iraq War, never missing an opportunity to remind voters of Clinton’s support for that invasion. But he has also pledged to destroy ISIL, something he alleges current U.S. policy will never achieve. But that can only mean committing American troops to the region. As for Assad, whom he has pronounced “bad,” Trump has expressed no interest in angering Vladimir Putin by interfering with Russia’s desire to keep Assad in power.
“Trump’s experience in foreign policy matter is dire, to say the least, and the erratic nature of his approach confounds explanation,” says H.A. Hellyer, senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East in London. “What little he has said on Syria indicates he’s more comfortable with the Russian position than he is with the current American one, and views ISIL as more of a threat to regional and international stability than Assad’s regime.”
While Clinton has a four-year record of foreign policy decisions to indicate her tendencies, Trump’s utter lack of a record is what confounds those trying to responsibly predict what he might do.
“Trump is unpredictable and a total mystery, ‘a jump in the dark’, possibly over a cliff,” Nadim Shehadi, director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, says. “But those who are favorable to him think that he will be more like a chairman of the board and appoint various CEOs for different tasks like Defense, State, Health, and leave them to do their job.”
Hamid, from Brookings, says there might be some flexibility in Trump’s approach if his advisers, or public opinion, can persuade him to re-engage on Syria. “In the form of establishing no-fly and no-drive zones, which Trump seemed to suggest recently he'd be open to,” Hamid says. “But this is at cross purposes with his friendliness with Putin, who would see such safe zones as a threat.”
It’s possible to imagine either one of the candidates getting America more involved in Syria, but the question is what would their objectives be—knocking out a terrorist threat, or solving a humanitarian crisis? The answer to that question holds the fate of the people of Daraya.
Daraya was once famous for the workshops in which traditional artisans fashioned wood and bamboo furniture—the kind of chairs that are used in cafes all over Syria. But it was also a place where resistance thrived. It goes back to 2003, when the residents protested the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, and organized protests and rallies. The United States invasion of Iraq, which angered most Sunnis in the region, including Daraya residents, solidified the town’s reputation as politically active—or in the eyes of the Assad regime “troublemakers.” When the Arab Spring reached Syria in early 2011, Daraya was one of the initial hot spots where protests sprouted and Syrian soldiers rushed in to quell them. Later that year, a young tailor in the town, whom everyone called “Little Gandhi” for his brazen opposition to the violence, was taken away for questioning by security forces. His severely tortured body was found four days later. The government said “armed gangs” had killed him, but Catherine Ashton, then the EU's Foreign Policy chief, fixed the blame elsewhere: “He was killed for his resolve to stand up peacefully to the brutal repression perpetrated by the Syrian regime.”
Things escalated from there. In late August 2012, news reached me that a massacre had taken place. Daraya had been shelled for two days before Syrian forces entered on August 25 in a house-to-house clearing operation. People were taken from their homes, lined up against walls and in basements and shot.
I entered Daraya in late August 2012, disguised as a Syrian with a local woman. Before I arrived, The Guardian in London had called Daraya “Syria’s worst massacre” but several well-known Western reporters had traveled inside with the Syrian government and denied this. They were told the hundreds of dead bodies and the utter destruction of the town had been the result of a “prisoner swap gone wrong” and that it was a “counterterrorist operation” to clean up the area.
The real estate mogul’s thoughts on Syria are in such conflict they ought to have their own no-fly zone.
But the minute I got inside the town and smelled the rotting flesh of the dead, I knew this was no prisoner swap. I know something of the forensics of massacres and genocides and I could tell from my investigation that people had been lined up against walls and shot. I also knew there were many dead; that potent, sickening smell of rotting bodies reminded me too much of my time reporting in Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor. Some of the people I spoke to told me the Syrian forces had stormed their streets and houses. They were followed by the paramilitary Shabiha “Death squads.” Some told me they had taken victims into their basements and assassinated them one by one. The ones who survived are the ones who hid. Ahmad was one of them. He was still a teenager then and his family was still intact. This is what he remembers, relayed to me in Skype messaging fragments when he could get electricity:
It (Was) horrible….I was afraid for my little sister Mareana… We were hiding in a hole under the ground... (it) Was terrifying was the smell of blood and death cover the city.”
There had been warnings this would happen. Earlier that summer, while I was able to work on the regime side, reporting from Homs, Douma, Berzeh and other restive towns, the fighting had intensified. Syrian military helicopters had dropped leaflets to rebels fighting the regime: "The Syrian army is determined to cleanse every inch in Syria and you have only two choices: Abandon your weapons … or face inevitable death.”
Maybe death is inevitable given how difficult it has proven to save the people in Daraya who remain trapped by Syria’s 4th Division, the much reviled armored unit led by Assad’s younger brother, Maher.
The U.N. has led the spectacularly ineffective efforts in Syria. In June 2012, Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, oversaw the Geneva communiqué, calling for an end to the fighting, a protection of civilians and a road map to peace. But Annan resigned his position as envoy to Syria two months later, replaced by Algerian statesman Lakhdar Brahimi, who said pointedly that none of the countries involved "had the interest of the Syrian people as their first priority." He resigned too. His replacement, Staffan de Mistura, took the job in August 2014. De Mistura, an Italian-Swedish diplomat with years of experience working in Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq, came out of retirement at the urging of Ban Ki-moon. He has spent the past two years on a plane, shuttling between Moscow, the White House, Damascus, Tehran, Vienna and U.N. offices in Geneva where he tries, in vain, to get the Syrian opposition to talk to him, and to each other.
De Mistura is as appalled by the suffering of the Syrians as anyone, but he lacks something crucial: the backing of the American military, that is, the ability to call in an airstrike to break a blockade. Richard Holbrooke had this support when he was ending the war in Bosnia. Months of airstrikes around Sarajevo and elsewhere eventually pushed Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, to the negotiating table. De Mistura, in a sense, is fighting a losing battle against the Obama administration, which wants to exit the White House without entangling the country in another bloody, protracted Middle East conflict.
Nearly everyone I know who works in Syria agrees that airstrikes after the 2013 Ghouta chemical attacks would have ended the war sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. “What I would have liked to have seen,” said one senior U.N. official who worked consistently in Syria throughout the war “were neat little strategic airstrikes after the chemical attacks in 2013 that would have sent a clear message to Assad that he could not get away with it.”
I still look at Daraya and am reminded, painfully, of people starving to death on the eastern side of Mostar in Bosnia, which was besieged by Croats and Serbs for weeks. In the late spring of 1993, the U.N. High Commission on Refugees tipped me off that people there were surviving on little more than cherries plucked from trees. Daraya reminds me of that time, a time of starvation in the middle of Europe, when precious food was readily available sometimes only a couple of miles away. Now people are starving in the middle of Syria’s so-called bread basket, a region of rich farmland. Once, you could buy huge bunches of grapes grown locally, but there is no fresh fruit or vegetable for sale there now. There are some children who were born during the siege years who don’t know what fruit is. Bouthaina Shaaban, a British-educated top adviser to Assad, denied this. In May, she said that "nobody is starving in Daraya", which was "producing peas and beans and food and wild berries that is enough for the entire Syria." If that were really the case, of course, there would be no need for emergency food convoys.
Bosnia is often invoked as a model for a possible resolution—in other words, some version of the Dayton Peace Accords that divided Yugoslavia into ethnic cantons. Dayton did end the killing but it had dire consequences, exacerbating sectarianism, even though Holbrooke, the chief negotiator, never intended Dayton to be a final agreement. To bring the crisis to an end, required NATO bombing of Kosovo four years later.
When I first started reporting in Syria, I saw many comparisons with Bosnia, but I do not think the Dayton model can work now given the proxy countries involved and the rise of ISIL. There needs to be a different negotiation template—one that aims for maximum inclusion and demographic diversity, including voices from all over the country and across the ethnic divide without, if possible, partitioning the country into federations, like Bosnia.
“Daraya is a microcosm of all that is wrong with international policy in Syria,” says Nadim Shehadi, of Tufts. “It has been under siege since early 2013 and the perception is that even the U.N. is complicit in the regime’s siege and starvation policy … If all the West can do is watch while the Assad regime’s allies, Iran and Russia, are fully engaged on its side then further radicalization is to be expected. Syrians want a third choice."
The first presidential debate will be held in late September. It will be the first opportunity to press Clinton and Trump to explain their sketchy ideas for how to solve this intractable crisis. Interestingly, the site of the debate is Dayton, Ohio, scene of the famous peace accords.
Meanwhile, the food from the June shipment will be running out around now. No one knows when the next one will arrive. And it’s a long time until January when the next president is sworn in.