Syria is in the news again. The country’s civil war has dragged on for over a decade and finally, Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown and fled the country.
Humanitarian teams are fighting an uphill battle in Syria. Millions were displaced by the fighting internally and several million fled the country and became refugees. Syrians are now flowing home. The lineup at the border from Lebanon to cross back into Syria is enormous.
The joy and hope people feel about being able to return is outweighed by the stark reality of just how hard it will be to rebuild and start again. There is no rebuilding without peace and the rule of law, which I fear has not been re-established. Different armed factions are seizing control of different areas and the main fighting faction that seems to have the most territory and certainly the most important territory is well-armed and backed by a lot of angry young men with guns. People are still in need of all the basics to survive including food, water and access to primary healthcare.
Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani leads the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement. This is his nom de guerre. As a young man, he joined ISIS in Iraq to fight the Americans and was held in U.S. captivity for some time. He was then sent back to his native Syria to open a branch office and recruit fighters and do fundraising. In 2011, he switched his group’s allegiance to Al-Qaeda and called the group Jabhat al-Nusra, which became a prolific killing machine. Western countries including Canada and Turkey, along with the United Nations, classified them as a terrorist entity.
But al-Jolani dissolved al-Nusra and publicly disavowed al-Qaeda. The newly created HTS was born and rebranded. Other groups soon merged to increase its fighting force and capacity. I’ll be honest: I didn’t think a terrorist entity could rebrand. The leader has been interviewed by CNN and spoke about how his views have changed as he has aged.
Last week, the group took control of Aleppo, which has a lot of Christians. HTS publicly released messages about inclusiveness and rejecting violence and revenge. They have gone out of their way to tell Christians and other minority groups that they will not be persecuted. In the last few days, they have taken control of the capital, Damascus.
The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army patrols areas north of Aleppo to the Turkish border and north of Raqqa. Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who are backed by the U.S., control a lot of the northeast. Russia still has an airbase in the northwest and it is backing the remaining regime forces who control a small part of the territory.
Syrians around the world are rejoicing that Assad has left. For over 50 years, his family ruled Syria. That rule was oppressive, forced millions to flee, and featured a human slaughterhouse known as Sednaya military prison. In reality, the oppressive regime had more than a hundred detention facilities around the country. Amnesty International estimated 13,000 executions between 2011 and 2016 alone. As the regime fell and its supporters fled, the captors abandoned the prison. Thousands of families descended on it with the hope of finding their loved ones.
I think back to 2016 when I was in Istanbul attending the World Humanitarian Summit which promised change and efficiency and more aid to people in need. But in reality, it failed to deliver effective change. The number of people in need of aid has now reached over 360 million, which has tripled since 2016, and the money available to meet that caseload has not kept pace. Back then, I was helping to provide field hospital tents that could be used to decontaminate people and save the hospitals from the off-gassing of patients because Assad and his thugs were deploying chemical weapons on his people. That is what his regime did. In the neighbouring Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq, GlobalMedic teams were helping Syrian refugees living in the camps.
One night, I grabbed a bit of dinner and met a couple of young men who had fled Syria. They restarted their lives and had opened an eatery that served Turkish flatbread pizzas. Their story was disturbing and I remember it as clear as day nearly a decade later. There were three brothers. The regime had taken the eldest and held him in their infamous house of horror. Their father told his remaining two sons to take whatever cash and valuables he had and flee to safety to carry on the family. So they fled and tried to start a life in neighbouring Turkey along with 3.7 million Syrians.
Members of the regime would check in on the father and offer him proof that his son was still alive and offer to release him if he produced cash. I think the family realized that their loved one was dead but the idea of holding onto hope was all they had. So between dropping barrel bombs on children and torturing civilians, members of the regime kept trying to extort an old man of everything he had to save his oldest child. He wisely gave what he had to his two youngest boys who fled with everything they could carry. After dinner, they showed me their brother’s guitar which they would play with the hope of seeing him one day. I have no doubt in my mind that if their dad was still alive he would be searching the grounds of that prison right now. I hope it works out for their family but I fear the worst.
It is going to be a really tough road for humanitarian agencies. There will be more people in need in hard-to-reach places. But there is hope because the terror and horror of Assad and his regime is gone.
— Rahul Singh is professional paramedic with 35 years of experience. He founded humanitarian aid agency GlobalMedic in 1998.