Preserving America’s Humanitarian Syria Policy
Since approximately 2011, when world governments first began condemning the brutal military crackdown on civilian protesters in Syria, there has been a push to normalize relations with the Assad regime.
As the tide of war shifted over the years, so too has the narrative behind this push evolved. In 2015, direct Russian intervention caused discussion around the conflict to hit an inflection point. And since the fall of Aleppo in late 2016, countless TV pundits, myopic analysts, and wishful thinkers have made the same constant proclamations: The war is over, Assad has won, and we should negotiate instead of continuing to engage in what many have declared to be an aimless conflict.
This line of thinking has increasingly found an audience across mainstream media, the foreign policy establishment, and certain spheres of Middle East analysis. And support for this position has grown steadily in the past several years, driven in part by Russian policy interests and a domestic sentiment of war fatigue as the ongoing conflict in Syria grows increasingly stagnant.
Of course, the assessment that Assad has won is superficial at best.
Front lines have been at a relative standstill for years, and it is true that Assad has solidified his reign over the vast majority of Syria’s territory. It’s also true that there is no meaningful opposition to the Assad regime and its backers anywhere in Syria, nor is there much appetite among the international community to dismantle the regime. It is almost certainly the case that Assad will survive for years to come.
As is the course of things, however, these realities are often severed from their surrounding context.
Front lines have hardly shifted, except for the millions of Syrians displaced in recent years by regime incursions, including nearly a million displaced between December 2019 and March 2020 — the single largest wave of displacement across the entire Syrian conflict. Assad has solidified his reign over the vast majority of Syria’s territory at the expense of the vast majority of Syria’s population, while those who “return” are trafficked directly into regime detention, where they are tortured en masse and often killed. And Assad’s regime will survive for years to come, with the intensive support of its foreign backers and primarily by virtue of stealing aid, engaging in international narcotics trafficking, and defrauding the entire United Nations (UN) interagency for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those who support normalization with the regime under the guise that Assad has won often cast their beliefs as “foreign policy realism,” and castigate anyone who opposes this line of thinking as moralists or idealists. Prominent Syria analysts like Aron Lund have shifted towards an embrace of the Assad regime under a hasty reinterpretation of Assad’s methods and motives, and even former US Syria ambassador Robert Ford has argued that the Assad regime is the only party capable of providing “stability [and] security” in the long-term.
Prominent DC-based Syrian-American foreign policy adviser Adham Sahloul was perhaps the most recent typically pro-opposition commentator to break towards this trend of so-called pragmatic support for normalization with the regime. In a piece published on October 27, 2021 for War on the Rocks, Sahloul argues that in order to end “America’s diplomacy-last Syria policy,” the US must recalculate its approach to engagement with Assad — up to and including the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of US ground forces in northeast Syria, the reincorporation of SDF-held territory into regime-held territory, and the direct “cooperation” of US air forces in Russia’s bombing campaigns across the country.
According to Sahloul, those who disagree with his “pragmatic” assessment of the situation in Syria are either too insulated from the costs of current US policy towards the country, or too obsessed with their own moral standards and expectations of justice, to see the truth — a common refrain among many within the pro-normalization crowd. And much like those within the broader pro-normalization crowd, Sahloul concludes his belief that this policy approach will result in meaningful changes from the Assad regime, including “limited concessions from the regime and its backers.”
Of course, such a conclusion is not pragmatic at all, nor even vaguely within the realm of foreign policy realism. To suggest that any degree of leniency or punishment might force the Assad regime into conceding its position is fundamentally ignorant of the past 50 years of Syrian political history, and further, fundamentally misunderstands the Assad regime’s governing philosophy and wartime strategy of total submission.
As is standard among those who advocate for normalization, Sahloul compounds these miscues with a sharply unrealistic assessment of the situation on the ground. Among the concessions he believes Assad might be inclined towards granting are “verifiable assurances that [the regime] would allow the repatriation of Syrian refugees in line with international law,” and “unhindered humanitarian aid across Syria” — both of which don’t align with ongoing dynamics in Syria.
Mass detention is inextricable from the Syrian state, and those who do return to the country are systematically subjected to an industrial network of torture, rape, and mass murder. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid in Syria has been co-opted on a structural level, resulting in a circumstance whereby the World Health Organization (WHO) no longer delivers aid to refugee camps, instead opting to send an entire convoy of empty cattle cars in an effort to ferry those refugees back into regime prisons.
These are the fundamental realities of the modern conflict in Syria, and it is those people still living in the country who must bear these circumstances each day. The approximately 10 million internally and externally displaced Syrian refugees refuse to return to Assad not because of the political circumstances, but despite them. And since the defeat of ISIS, US objectives in Syria have shifted not towards regime change, but towards humanitarian maintenance — a crucial factor for the millions of people still living in Syria’s opposition-held areas, who understand the reality of life under Assad’s reign.
As former Secretary of State John Kerry said following the 2013 Ghouta chemical attacks, “trust-and-verify” is a useless adage when dealing with the Assad regime. (Nor, as Sahloul suggests, is “distrust-and-verify” enough.) Instead, according to Kerry, those seeking to engage with Assad must “verify and verify.”
As part of Obama’s broader red line backpedal, the United States ultimately failed to uphold this standard of verification on all levels, thereby creating the de facto conditions of US policy which are seen in Syria today, with US ground forces primarily serving in the capacity of humanitarian and infrastructural maintenance across a series of crumbling statelets, and US air forces largely conducting limited operations against Hurras ad-Din in the northwest.
As Sahloul suggests, this policy path is unsustainable. A tiny contingent of US forces in Syria, in the absence of a comprehensive civil society aid package, will do little more than maintain the stagnancy of the current situation, and will allow interested actors — like the Russian Federation — to chip away at humanitarian safe zones in Syria under the guise of military collaboration.
So what would a more pragmatic policy look like?
Foremost, the US must continue to emphasize its longstanding intelligence assessment that the Assad regime is a duplicitous actor interested only in securing victory via total submission. As history has shown, every single effort at engagement with the Assad regime, no matter the process, has failed catastrophically — from disarmament, to humanitarian aid, to the drafting of a new constitution. After all, a regime paranoid enough to blow up its own crisis cell of senior government officials is inevitably paranoid enough to blow up international processes at even the slightest hint that those processes might constrain the functions of the regime.
Second, Washington should commit to a maintenance of US forces in sensitive areas where civilians are reliant on a US presence for their survival, including the Tanf garrison. Without a stalwart of ground forces serving an operational role of humanitarianism, civilian lives are threatened, and the US presence in Syria risks slipping into another endless air war against a constantly evolving set of non-state actors.
Finally, Washington must extend its current set of sanctions against the corrupt regime officials and industries responsible for both metaphorically and literally looting Syria’s economy. Drawing up additional targeted sanctions allows relevant financial and regulatory authorities to build out networks of regime financiers, which may help assist in future anti-money laundering and anti-trafficking operations. And without the leverage of additional targeted sanctions in response to evolving assessments of regime activity, warlords and oligarchs will continue to exploit loopholes in the humanitarian process, and the US will face further embarrassment as the children of corrupt plutocrats like Rami Makhlouf are seen parading around its cities in expensive supercars.
