Vanishing Point: The Syrian Conflict ten years on

The Syrian war has been raging for ten long years. Through countless reports, headlines, and news articles Syria has become part of our daily newsfeed. But even before Covid -19, were we becoming desensitized to distressing images of Syrian people being pulled from rubble or children caught in the midst of smoking houses? Images of everyday survival and existence in a warzone have become mundane and regular to a Western audience who increasingly turn away from any real engagement with what this means for those experiencing its consequences.

The result is waning interest, and ever-growing indifference towards Syria and other foreign conflicts.

This disregard has been aggravated with the outbreak of Covid-19. Although Covid-19 disproportionately impacts ‘emerging’ or ‘developing’ countries, the attention of wealthier, more ‘developed’ countries, has been towards their home situation and away from the effects of the pandemic elsewhere. 

Since the arrival of Covid-19 there has been a marked shift in the reporting of conflicts such as Syria, which have become highly normalised in the face of the severe and abnormal impact of the virus. Gone are the days where Syrian human rights abuses are represented on the front pages of respected newspapers, even though fundamental shifts and developments have taken place over the recent months.

Despite poverty in Syria reaching record highs - 90% of Syrians now live-in poverty - last month the UK government decided to cut aid funding to Syria by a third. The UK’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, pledged to fund £205 million, a decrease of a third of the previous years’ contribution of £300 million.

The UN had aimed to raise $10bn in aid for Syria from governments and donors, but only managed to accumulate $6.4bn in funds with only $4.4bn pledged for this year. UN and Syria-focused agencies have warned that the long-term implications of cuts to aid will massively outweigh whatever minimal savings countries like the UK plan to make (£95 million is a drop in the ocean for the UK Treasury). The Head of the UN World Food Programme, David Beasley, warned that food rations would have to be cut by 30% across the country to fund deficits in aid and spelled out the direct negative consequences for Western countries: “we will see a second wave of migration into Europe and extremism will flourish.”

Recent policies by the Home Office suggest that the British government intends to wash its hands of its responsibility in perpetuating extremism and immigration. In February 2021, the government announced plans for the complete overhaul of UK asylum policy, unveiling that the new system will allow the deportation of any asylum seeker who arrives in Britain via routes that the UK government deems as “illegal”.

This policy has prompted uproar amongst scholars and academics who compiled a letter stating that “under international law one cannot travel illegally if one is seeking asylum”, and therefore any government deportation conducted of refugees deemed to travel by ‘illegal routes’ violates international law.

This week also saw the intervention of UK Watchdog, and Rights and Security International, over the Home Office’s secrecy about UK women in Syria stripped of citizenship. The Home Office has refused to disclose the number of women and girls they have stripped of citizenship after travelling to join ISIS.

Under law, the Home Office can strip citizenship if doing so is “conducive to public good”, although it is illegal to render someone stateless if they are not eligible for citizenship in another country.

Rights and Security International have made a request under the Freedom of Information Act and stated that without full disclosure and transparency from the Home Office there was a risk of discrimination and danger of gender-related harm in the process of revoking citizenship. They also noted that the women stripped of citizenship were often in extremely vulnerable socioeconomic positions and may have been under 18 when they decided to join ISIS.

These policies show a wilful denial of the UK’s responsibility to engage in an international effort to fund programmes which help relieve poverty and cycles of extremism and mass immigration.

Whilst the British government has turned a blind eye to the problems in Syria, Germany has moved to challenge the impunity felt by Syrian Government officials responsible for horrific human rights violations. This year a German court sentenced the former intelligence officer, Eyad Al-Gharib, to four and-a-half years in prison under Section 7 of The Codes of Crimes against International Law.

In this landmark case, minor official Al-Gharibwas charged for complicitly with the arrest and torture of anti-Assad protestors in 2011. His trial was considered a test case for the prosecuting lawyers, to build up a body of evidence for future trials against the actions of President Basha al-Assad’s regime. German human rights lawyers have spent years using the principle of universal jurisdiction to reach out across borders and pursue international cases.

Not only does this ruling have direct implications for the current trial of Anwar Raslan, a high-ranking official who Al-Gharib testified against, but more broadly it challenges any sense of impunity that officials complicit in war crimes may have felt. 

Taking an international comparison, the British government does not appear to understand the need for international leadership that aids persecuted populations, and helps resistance to extremists who feed off poverty, power vacuums, and past exploitations to radicalise vulnerable people. The UK Government also seems to lack any commitment to uphold international law in its own policies but also in the law courts. Most short-sighted of all is the government’s inattention to the need for economic and social intervention, and the good that can come from helping people who have experienced countless persecutions to recover their lives. 

Written by Sofia - Conscience Collective