The war in Syria, which will enter its 10th year next month, shames the world. Powerful western countries, namely the US, Britain and their European allies, could and should have done more to stop it. Instead, they have failed to act decisively as Bashar al-Assad’s regime perpetrated countless repeat atrocities against the Syrian people, assisted by Russia and Iran. This butchery continues.
It’s not only governments that failed in their legal and moral duty to protect life and uphold international law. More than any other recent crisis, Syria has exposed the fatal impotence of a divided UN security council. Britain’s parliament got Syria badly wrong. In 2013, the House of Commons, running scared of another Iraq, blocked military intervention. The US Congress followed suit.
A massive influx of war refugees shook Europe in 2015 and could do so again but still the EU cannot muster a humane collective approach. The UN’s “peace process” lacked energetic support and was sidelined by a self-interested rival effort involving Russia, Iran and Turkey. Unsurprisingly, ceasefire after ceasefire has broken down.
The enormous scale of the Syrian catastrophe can be measured in other ways, for example, by the damage done to the international consensus banning chemical weapons and to humanitarian law in general. Another dreadful consequence was the reprieve it provided Sunni jihadists defeated and dispersed by the Iraq “surge”. Syria gave the Islamists a new battlefront. The result was Islamic State’s caliphate.
For Britain, which joined a coalition to crush Isis – but not to stop the wider war – the blowback from its incoherent, inconsistent policy continues, in the form of raised terrorist threat levels and increasing Islamophobia. The problem of below-the-radar Islamist radicalisation, highlighted by the terrible Streatham and London Bridge attacks, is exacerbated by tensions fuelled by Syria’s war.
Respect for civil liberties in Britain has also been negatively affected, as shown by the case of Shamima Begum, a naive, British-born teenager of Bangladeshi descent who travelled to Syria to join the jihadists, got married and now wants to return home. Last week, she lost the initial stage of her appeal against the Home Office’s decision to revoke her UK citizenship. As we’ve said before, the government’s treatment of British wives, children and orphans of jihadists is unfair and short-sighted. The correct approach to British citizens such as Begum, however abhorrent their views, is not to abandon our values or to junk due process. Begum should be allowed back to the UK and put on trial, if the evidence against her allows. The same approach should apply to captured fighters.
Unchecked chaos in Syria has meanwhile allowed foreign state actors with no interest in stemming human suffering to exploit the situation. Russia’s behaviour is unforgivable. Like Assad, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has a case to answer for alleged war crimes. Turkey and Qatar should sever links to anti-western Islamist groups. Israel must stop using Syria as a battleground for a not-so-covert war against Iran.
Past failures should not discourage an urgent new effort to avoid impending calamity in Idlib and end the war. Idlib’s doctors and medical staff are calling on António Guterres, the UN secretary general, to intervene personally. Guterres should go there – and see for himself the wreck of humanity, the ruin of a nation and the shame of a once-proud international system of laws.
