Since 2013, 400,000 civilians living in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of Syria’s capital city Damascus have been caught in a crossfire between rebel forces and the Syrian military. After an intense government assault on the area began in mid-February, the United Nations Security Council unsuccessfully attempted to broker a cease-fire to deliver desperately needed food aid and medical supplies to the civilian population.
With a brief pause in the fighting on March 5, a convoy of 46 trucks entered eastern Ghouta with food for about 27,000 people. But the World Health Organization reported that Syrian government forces had confiscated up to 70 percent of the medical supplies on board. When shelling from government forces resumed, all trucks were forced to evacuate, with nine unable to deliver their supplies.
According to the U.N., since mid-February, 600 people are believed to have been killed and more than 2,000 injured in eastern Ghouta after the Syrian military launched their air and ground offensive. There are recent reports of outlawed chlorine gas attacks on civilians. Overall, nearly half a million people are estimated to have died and 12 million driven from their homes since the war began in 2011. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Noah Bonsey, senior analyst on Syria with the International Crisis Group, who examines the current humanitarian crisis in eastern Ghouta and prospects for a peaceful settlement of the seven-year conflict.
NOAH BONSEY: So, I think the place to start here is that it’s a completely man-made humanitarian crisis. It’s a devastating humanitarian crisis, but one created directly as a result of the tactics employed in this war. In this case, what we’re talking about is a siege by the Syrian regime, enabled by its allies, Iran and Russia, over a siege on a rebel-held area of some 400,000. Easter Ghouta is the biggest, most dangerous and worrisome example of siege tactics applied in Syria, but it’s by no means the first.
It’s just the latest element of a regime military strategy that’s based heavily on collective punishment – applying siege tactics, indiscriminate bombardment and in many cases, bombardment – aerial and artillery bombardment that discriminately targets civilian neigh-borhoods and infrastructure, aiming to raise the price of resistance in these areas, but in particular to make conditions so bad for civilians living in these areas that they raise pressure on the rebels in their midst to surrender.
This is something that the regime and its allies have applied on multiple battlefronts in the country, especially around Damacus. And this is the latest instance. In addition to the fact that you have 20,000 civilians in this besieged area now – which is also especially worrisome about this instance – is the fact that these people have literally nowhere to go.
The previous siege in Aleppo, which was also extremely brutal, there was at least the prospect of people moving out to adjacent rebel-held areas – or, in theory, at least to Turkey. In Damascus, they’re in a sea of regime-held areas.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Noah, the Syrian government of Bashir Al Assad justifies the siege against this area known as eastern Ghouta. By talking about the shelling of Damascus, the capital of Syria, by rebel groups that they label as terrorist organizations – including al Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, who they say provoked this siege by their attacks on civilian areas of Damascus. Could you give us the bigger picture there?
Are there any serious efforts underway to sit down at the negotiating table and hammer out some kind of agreement?
Russia has also facilitated political meetings on it on its own turf, but again, not really. We couldn’t consider them serious efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict. And you describe accurately the fact that while there’s broadly speaking, a trend of regime momentum, what we’ve seen in parallel is that the international aspects of the conflict have increased. Israel’s gotten more involved. It’s concerned about gains by the regime and Iran-backed militias near the Golan Heights, and it’s also concerned about Iran building permanent bases in Syria and it’s been escalating its airstrikes to address those two things.
A much bigger role on the ground is played by Turkey, which is now conducting a major offensive in northwest Syria, in primarily the Kurdish territory controlled by the same organization that the U.S. is allied with in the fight against ISIS. The U.S. is working with this organization in northeast Syria, but in the northwest pocket of Afrin, the U.S. doesn’t have a presence – basically isn’t backing up those Kurdish forces as Turkey is attacking them. Again, here, too, you have dramatic humanitarian concerns as that offensive continues.
So with all this internationalization, it’s easy to see why this conflict – which was already almost impossible to resolve via negotiations before it was so internationalized, now is even harder to do so. Especially in a broader geopolitical moment of such polarization and uncertainty.
For more information on the International Crisis Group, visit crisisgroup.org and a special section on Syria at crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/eastern-mediterranean/syria.
