Earthquake aid crisis in Syria demands international attention

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria last week has compounded the devastating effects of Syria’s twelve-year civil war, particularly in the northwest. Controlled mainly by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of armed groups formerly affiliated with al-Qaeda, Syrians in the northwest are under siege by the Syrian state, adding to their suffering for more than a decade.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has effectively blockaded the area, including the city and governorate of Idlib, preventing humanitarian aid passing through Damascus from reaching the besieged region. However, basic necessities like fuel and medicine must come to the region through Turkey.

The official death toll from the earthquake has reached more than 33,000 in Turkey and Syria, although the actual number is undoubtedly higher. In northwest Syria, the cascading crisis includes a grueling civil war, internal displacement due to the war that and for the ISIS government of terror, the Russian bombing campaign, government blockade, ongoing conflict, and now the great earthquake has brought untold suffering in that area.

“It’s a perfect storm that I’m very worried about,” Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox in an interview. “You have [a large portion of] 5 million people who have depended on emergency aid for the current year. About two-thirds of them have been displaced from other parts of Syria; approximately 80 percent have been displaced between six and 25 times.

Some search and rescue operations have reportedly been delayed for a week, as groups like the White Helmets doubt there are any survivors. And the capacity to care for survivors is limited without the influx of foreign aid, experts told Vox. “Civil society is active in a sense, whatever support is received from outside, from Europe or the US, and from Turkey that will go through Bab al-Hawa – only one limited entry point,” Sahr Muhammedally, an expert in international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians in conflict, told Vox in an interview.

Confusion and fear about sanctions against the Assad regime, as well as misunderstandings about the political situation prevented financial and other aid from reaching some of the people most affected by the earthquake.

“As [Assad’s] the main international supporters, the governments of Iran and Russia have tried very hard to blame Syria’s economic problems from Assad’s role in destroying the country to sanctions,” Wa’el Alzayat, president of Emgage, a national Muslim voter mobilization and advocacy organization. and former State Department expert on Middle East policy, wrote in the Washington Post on Friday. “While the sanctions have certainly contributed to the stunting of government expenditures and the depreciation of the Syrian lira, they have not had a significant impact on the delivery of humanitarian aid,” since the sanctions have humanitarian carve-outs that allow aid to Damascus.

The government’s siege made the crisis worse.

The Assad regime has regained about 70 percent of Syria’s territory after losing the country – first to the revolution that began in 2011, then to ISIS. Some of the remaining areas, namely the northeast, are controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are mainly composed of Syrian Kurds. The northwest is controlled by HTS as well as several Turkish-backed groups; HTS has controlled at least part of the region since officially splitting with al-Qaeda in 2017. The US government designated HTS as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in 2018, in addition to the designation of the group’s predecessor, al-Nusra Front. .

Whatever the group’s affiliation with al-Qaeda, it has carried out violent acts in the region. Still, the regime’s blockade — a “starve or surrender” tactic, Muhammedally said — has led to a cruel and degrading situation in Idlib. “This area is an open prison that is not connected from anywhere,” Zaher Sahloul, president of the aid organization MedGlobal, told Vox in an interview. MedGlobal has a team in Gaziantep, a southern Turkish city close to the Syrian border that is home to 462,000 Syrian refugees, also in northwestern Syria.

The armed groups in charge of the area “maintain limited civilian and public functions, such as maintaining water system improvements, but they rely on humanitarian organizations to provide services,” Muhammedally said. “They don’t have the resources to play the role that government would play in providing essential services.”

Furthermore, Russian forces and the regime attacked civilian targets including hospitals, sanitation facilities – giving rise to the cholera outbreak that started in the northeast – doctors, and civil defense organizations like the White Helmets, destroying health infrastructure. The regime has also cut off electricity to the region and stopped paying the salaries of public workers, leaving search and rescue operations and medical services dependent on generators, which run on diesel fuel.

Groups like MedGlobal have built hospitals and clinics in more resilient places – in the mountains and on the ground – as well as providing medical care and fuel for search and rescue operations, but the level of need is very high and will only grow over time. , said Sahloul.

The question remains whether other countries will step forward to provide continued aid. “It is a failure of the international community to focus only on emergency aid,” Muhammedally said. “Donor government aid agencies need to look at this tragedy and say, ‘What should we do?’ Currently this is emergency aid and response, but it needs to move to a form of assistance to make communities more resilient.

We must stop the politicization of humanitarian aid

Because the region is in conflict, it has caused confusion and politicization, both from the Assad regime and because of the confusion about how sanctions against HTS and the regime apply to humanitarian aid. That is, the region that is almost entirely dependent on outside aid has only seen a trickle in – and what has come in so far is not disaster aid, but resources that were already in place in northwestern Syria before the earthquake.

“Reliance on emergency aid is becoming dangerous because funding is being reduced and if it is only allowed because [UN] The Security Council resolution, then it can be cut by a veto in the Security Council,” said Muhammedally. If Russia, for example, vetoes a future resolution to allow cross-border aid from Turkey to northwestern Syria – similar to what happened in July 2022 – it will be more difficult to get critical aid to the region.

Some observers have called for an end to sanctions against Syria in order to get aid to those in need, but experts say that is a wrong point of view.

“UN agencies work in Damascus – all of them,” Hall said. “They’ve got billions of dollars in funding, too [international nongovernmental organizations] through the governments of Europe, England, and the United States, and it has been happening for the past 12 years, even before. So the sanctions are not related to humanitarian aid, there are exceptions for humanitarian aid, but the problem is more, banks and other countries are afraid to operate in Syria because of the sanctions and because they are worried about legal risks.

The US on Friday issued an order to extend the general license agreement for humanitarian aid for another six months. “It’s very broad and all-encompassing, and it’s largely in response to the claim that the Europeans and the sanctions are prohibiting a proper response,” Hall said.

Removing sanctions against the regime, therefore, will not make a difference to the people of northwest Syria, although clarifying the ability of banks and businesses to contribute to the earthquake response is a positive step. However, the disinformation campaign aimed at reducing the pressure from the Assad regime continues, despite the fact that, “He is responsible for the horrors that have occurred in the last 12 years, and there are always ways to overcome the sanctions. regime actors,” said Muhammedally.

Addressing the politicization of humanitarian aid in this situation requires thinking creatively about alternatives, Sahloul told Vox. “Why not plane medical supplies? We have an American military base not far from there, in the northeast of Syria,” which US forces use in anti-terrorism operations. “If there is political will to help the people, don’t blame traffic jams or cross the border, do it yourself!”

But that’s exactly the problem, Sahloul said – the lack of political will to actually get help for millions of people in the northwest of Syria who have been deeply traumatized by more than a decade of conflict, displacement, and terror.