The forgotten war in Syria goes on and the West must share the blame

Could it be, as some would have us believe, that the war is over or drawing to an end? The short answer to that question of course is no, far from it.

Just this week Norwegian diplomat Geir Pedersen was appointed as the UN’s new envoy for Syria, succeeding Italian-Swedish diplomat Staffan de Mistura, whom I once had the pleasure of interviewing in Edinburgh a few years ago.

De Mistura is said to be standing down for personal reasons, but many believe his departure reflects his frustration at the UN’s lack of leverage in ending the war.

That his successor Pedersen will have his work cut out is in no doubt, for the war in Syria brews on.

Just this week some of the fiercest exchanges between rebel and government forces took place in the country’s north since a“demilitarised zone” was announced by rebel-backer Turkey and Syrian government ally Moscow in September, to separate government troops from rebel fighters in their last major bastion in Idlib province.

Aid agencies have long warned that a final assault on Idlib could spell humanitarian disaster, and that still remains a possibility.

In the north-east of the country meanwhile, around the devastated city of Raqqa once the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State (IS) group’s caliphate, they were exhuming the bodies of yet more men, women and children from mass graves.

It was in Raqqa earlier this year that I joined Dr Mahmood Ibraheem and other members of the Civil Defence Unit as they performed that same grisly task across the canyons of ruins in Raqqa city centre.

Doctors, let alone forensic pathologists, are virtually non-existent in Raqqa these days and Dr Ibraheem, a GP, had found himself thrust into an unfamiliar and unforgiving role.

“I have to do this job now, there’s no one else and we must at least record some of the details of those remains we find even if we can’t identify the victims,” he told me.

“It is a human rights necessity as well as a medical one”.

Raqqa, like so many Syrian cities, remains in ruins. According to independent research groups that track American and Russian airstrikes in Syria, US aircraft and artillery bombarded Raqqa with an estimated 20,000 munitions during the five-month operation there. This is more than was dropped on all of Afghanistan in the whole of 2017.

To date there is precious little evidence of the international community’s willingness to step up to the plate with support for the city’s rehabilitation. Brett McGurk, the White House envoy for the war against IS, has frequently emphasised that Washington is only committed to the stabilisation of Raqqa, providing basic security and essential services, not to funding any long-term reconstruction. But on the ground in Raqqa there is little evidence of even this most basic of promised stabilisation provision. Why then should anyone be surprised if IS once again took root in such a climate of abandonment?

And so it goes on, not that most of us would notice given the lack of media coverage the war now receives. But just why is it then that Syria’s war and its consequences don’t occupy the news the way they once did? Is it perhaps that it’s too complicated, too frightful or too far away?

These last three possibilities formed the basis of a discussion I took part in last night at Glasgow’s Centre For Contemporary Arts (CCA) along with the journalist Idrees Ahmad, and Scottish-Syrian writers Robin Yassin- Kassab and Leila Al- Shami.

If there was one recurring theme in that discussion it was the way outside players, including the UK Government, have helped shift our perception of the war.

All but gone now are any references to the initial Syrian revolution that was part of the Arab Spring uprisings that took place against authoritarian rule, from Tunis to Cairo, Tripoli to Damascus.

What began as a peaceful challenge to the rule of the Assad regime, did, yes, turn into an armed struggle, such was the brutally punitive response of the Syrian government against those who had taken to the streets.

But many of those rebel fighters who took up arms were anything but Islamist extremists and indeed remain opposed to the jihadists to this day.

The help these revolutionaries begged for at the time was not forthcoming from the West, who squeezed them out. In doing this, the West has conveniently ignored or wilfully pushed aside the hopes of ordinary Syrians of throwing off the yoke of Assad’s rule.

Instead the likes of the UK and US governments much prefer to frame the war in their own language, the term Syrian “opposition” for example increasingly swapped for the term “terrorist”.

What coverage there is now of the war in Syria is almost exclusively and misleadingly presented through this prism of a war against Islamist terrorists. This, of course, is music to the ears of Assad and his allies in Moscow who never miss an opportunity to depict themselves as the bulwark against jihadism.

Many here, too, among the UK left seem only too willing to fall for this line peddled from Moscow and Damascus, conveniently ignoring the authoritarianism and brutality of the Syrian regime itself.

Better a Baathist despot and dictatorship than a jihadist one, goes their prevailing thinking.

This exclusively “war on terror” narrative of the crisis has effectively given foreign forces – be they American British, Russian, Turkish or Iranian – a free pass to maintain a presence in Syria.

As this “beating terrorism” mantra has evolved – even it if means the survival of the Assad regime – so the focus on the democratic hopes and aspirations of those originally opposed to the dictatorship have become near invisible.

The focus on people’s suffering, too, has diminished. To date an estimated half a million Syrians have been killed, more than half the population internally displaced and millions more made refugees. We have been left, as one Middle East commentator recently observed, with a “Syria without Syrians”. Is it any wonder their struggle for democracy and the terrible suffering that has accompanied it no longer makes headlines anymore?