Tag Archives: Damascus

Britain, Government, Middle East, Politics, Society, Syria

A moment of danger as well as opportunity

SYRIA

ON paper, the fall of a brutal tyrant, especially one who tortured and gassed his own people, should be a cause for unqualified celebration in the free world.

In practice, we know from bitter experience that when such despots are deposed, fresh chaos and tyranny all too often follow in the immediate aftermath. Elation over the horror of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi quickly turned to intense fear as Iraq and Libya were consumed by anarchy and civil war.

So, following the abrupt fall of Bashar al-Assad, the world is asking with some trepidation: What comes next for Syria, the wider Middle East, and the West?

Not for the first time in this volatile and unpredictable region, Western intelligence agencies were blindsided by the speed and intensity of the Islamist rebel offensive.

After capturing Damascus, and forcing Assad into exile, the insurgents declared total victory. Most prominent among the militias is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Its leaders may be preaching moderation right now, but they have their roots in ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Extremism and vengeance lurk behind the façade.

The various rebel factions have little in common except their hatred of Assad. Will they manage to unite to form a government – or plunge into a bloody power struggle?

The collapse of the regime is unquestionably a humiliation and a major strategic blow for Iran and Russia, its staunchest allies. Iran, because it uses Syria in funnelling weapons to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon; Russia, because it has military bases in Syria that it will wish to protect.

The British PM welcomed the toppling of Assad’s “barbaric regime” and called for peace and stability, but with radical Islamists now in charge he risks looking naïve. Events in Syria represent a profound challenge to the West.

Undoubtedly, the renewed violence and instability in Syria will almost certainly trigger fresh waves of refugees heading for Europe and the UK. Strong political leadership and coordination in the West is now an imperative.

One of the many unanswered questions is what will happen now to the 50,000 former ISIS militants currently held by Kurdish forces in north-east Syria.

If these brutal jihadis are released or fight their way out of the camps, the repercussions could be deadly in Europe as well as the Middle East.

And the warning given by ex-MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger of a “serious spike” in the threat posed this country by foreign and home-grown extremists that could be inspired by a resurgence of Islamic State is deeply alarming. We know from atrocities committed here in the past just how murderous and hard to predict these fanatics can be.

The current UK terror threat is at level 3 – “substantial” – but may well be elevated in the light of unfolding events. Extra-vigilance will now be needed by our security services, police, and the Border Force.

The world also awaits to see what kind of regime the rebels will create in Assad’s place. Whatever Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is saying publicly, the West must remember that it as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and so its leaders are unlikely to be fans of Western democracy.

The UK has announced £11 million in foreign aid for Syria. We must be very careful where that money goes. As Foreign Secretary David Lammy rightly reminded the House of Commons, HTS remains a proscribed terrorist organisation.

Jubilation over the fall of a dictator should not blind us to the risks of what comes next. As Mr Lammy said: “This is a moment of danger as well as opportunity.”

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Foreign Affairs, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, United Nations, United States

The west’s inaction in Syria highlights the impotence of the international community…

SYRIA

The West’s inability (or even insouciance) in becoming embroiled to counter the aggression of the regime of Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Damascus has led to the crumbling of resistance in the city. It was here that the rebel army had its stronghold. The evacuation of Homs is the personification of Western diplomatic failure.

It was a year ago now when the appalling bloodshed and mayhem of the civil war in Syria drew unanimous condemnation from the West. Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people last August added to the anger as the ‘red lines’ pronounced previously by President Obama had been crossed. America insisted that would trigger a military intervention in the event of that happening. But politicians then baulked as the Labour Party in Britain defeated the Government in the House of Commons on proposed military intervention. Those feelings rippled across to the United States, as politicians on either side of the Atlantic became forced into embracing a new isolationism born of years of war weariness in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The result has been a rebellion that can justly claim to have been let down by a collective failure of will in the West. It is a failure which could yet bear bitter fruit in Islamist anger exported by the disillusioned Syrian rebel fighters to the wider world. With the death toll spiralling with at least 150,000 dead, it is right to ask what has happened.

In looking for an answer, we should focus on two countries which have kept the Assad regime afloat for their own narrow and precarious interests – Iran and Russia. Tehran’s religious Ayatollah’s see Assad as an essential Shia bulwark against the power of Sunni forces in the region. Vladimir Putin’s motivation is as much to do with Russia’s current power games with the West as it is with the Syrian conflict on its own terms.

It was Mr Putin’s intervention last autumn that halted Western military action against Assad’s forces, preventing the opportunity that a decisive intervention could have brought by affording the rebels a chance to triumph. They needed at least to have secured a corner of a divided and disparate nation. Whilst the regime’s chemical weapons and capabilities appears to be on-course for being dismantled by the UN set deadlines, the cost – a real and tangible one in terms of geopolitics – has been the survival and, indeed, the strengthening of Assad’s reign in power, as its poorly-equipped rebel opponents fade. Recently, for instance, the Syrian tyrant has spoken of holding on to power for another six years, inconceivable to the West who had all but in name considered regime change a fundamental tenet in Syria three years ago.

President Putin’s observations would have noted the West’s stalemate and inaction in Syria, as well as calculating a likely similar reticence on intervention elsewhere by both Washington and London. The annexation of Crimea and continued power games in Ukraine, particularly in the east of the country, are proof of that.

Mr Putin, clearly emboldened, regards the West as weak. There is no real counter to Russian aggression and expansionism, other than the ranking up of political rhetoric by Western leaders. Yet, the harder Mr Putin acts abroad the stronger his position at home has become, where growing nationalist sentiment has garnered support for their president’s actions – a useful distraction given Russia’s floundering economy and weakening currency, clear effects of western imposed sanctions.

The rebels of Homs will be one of many aggrieved by the West’s inaction in Syria.

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Europe, Foreign Affairs, Government, Middle East, Syria, United Nations, United States

Syria’s chemical weapons and the deadlines to eliminate them…

SYRIA’S CHEMICAL STOCKPILES

The United Nations set deadlines for Syria to remove its chemical weapons. At first, the country cooperated. But as time has gone on Syria’s promise of removing its deadly chemical stocks appeared to stall, triggering concerns it would drag its feet as the regime of Bashar al-Assad became more confident of prevailing in the civil war. Its response in general terms to the UN’s decree has never been easy to read. Some of those fears, though, have now been allayed and to some extent seem exaggerated. The complex and difficult process, being overseen and supervised by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has gone in fits and starts. The process has involved transporting toxic and dangerous materials from some 23 sites through a war-torn country to the port of Latakia. The target for getting most of the dangerous stockpiles onto waiting cargo ships by the end of April has now been met.

A week ago, on April 22, the OPCW declared that 86.5% of all chemicals and 88.7% of the most deadly ‘Priority 1 substances’, such as sulphur mustard and precursors for sarin nerve gas, had been boarded and removed. According to reports, six consignments have been delivered to Latakia since early April, leading to the OPCW to declare that a ‘significant acceleration’ has occurred following a long gap when very little had happened.

A pictogram highlighting sites previously attacked using Syria's chemical weapons.

A pictogram highlighting sites previously attacked using Syria’s chemical weapons.

The chemicals are destined for a container terminal at Gioia Tauro, in southern Italy. Most of it is then expected to transfer to an American ship, the MV Cape Ray, which is equipped with two mobile hydrolysis units for neutralising the chemicals. The Cape Ray will then head into international waters with a ten-country security escort, and begin its work.  The director of American naval operations in Europe and Africa, Rear-Admiral Bob Burke, says that if the sea is fairly calm some 60-days of round-the-clock processing will be needed to neutralise the chemical agents. That makes it just about possible for the June 30 deadline to be met, a date in which all of Syria’s chemical weapons must be destroyed.

Anxieties persist, however. The first is the continuing disagreement between Syria and the OPCW over the destruction of production and storage sites. The issue is of setting bad precedent because, whilst the Syrians are arguing only for ‘destruction by inactivation’, which merely implies just locking some doors, the OPCW has a completely different interpretation as to what destruction of structures means. Because the Chemicals Weapons Convention (CWC) does not specifically define what that is, the OPCW has reverted to using a ‘common law’ standard which implies structures being ‘taken down to the foundations’. A compromise may be possible, but the setting of an inappropriate international legal precedent will be something the OPCW will wish to avoid.

For Syria to be certified as being entirely free of chemical weapons, a mechanism for future ‘challenge’ inspections will be needed. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the OPCW has never previously carried out such an inspection. It remains possible, of course, that the regime has hidden stocks, which on past form it might use (and then, later, blame the rebels for). The status of one chemical-weapons site, in an area the regime says is too dangerous for decommissioning purposes, remains ‘unresolved’.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the regime has not changed its ways. Reports earlier this month showed that helicopters dropped bombs filled with industrial chlorine gas on the rebel held village of Kfar Zita, injuring and terrifying dozens of civilians.

The use of chlorine gas is always hard to prove. It is not banned under the CWC and it does not linger, making the extraction of evidence from soil samples almost impossible. That is one reason why no signatory to the convention has asked the OPCW to investigate. If its use, however, was intended to maim or kill, and that would have to be established, it would be a clear breach of the convention.

A further requirement of the convention is that signatories give a full history of their chemical-weapons inventories and programmes, accounting for those scientists who worked on it and other countries that may have assisted it – in Syria’s case, probably Russia and Egypt with Iranian proxy support. But we should doubt that, with the architect of the programme still in power, the regime would reveal anything that might incriminate it in the killing of more than 1,000 people by sarin nerve gas in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta exactly 12 months ago, a crime for which it still denies all responsibility.

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  • 2 May, 2014

SYRIA’S CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Reviving the Geneva peace talks is urgently needed…

Last autumn, America (along with France) came within hours of launching military strikes on Syria in punishing the regime of Bashar al-Assad for killing at least 1,400 people in sarin gas attacks. Had those air strikes gone ahead Syria’s stockpiles and reserves of sarin would have been degraded along with other nerve agent stocks. Under an agreement brokered by the United States and Russia, Syria agreed to hand over its stocks of chemical precursors and weapons by February, a deadline which was later extended and which has just past. Yet, despite this added leeway, the evidence suggests that Damascus has still not surrendered its entire arsenal. UN monitors and observers believe that up to eight per cent of stockpiles remain.

Intelligence suggests that, even if the Assad regime had handed over its full inventory, it would not have mattered – for the regime has continued to use chemical weapons in rebel held areas. Tests on samples of soil taken after three recent attacks show definite and unambiguous traces of chlorine and ammonia, the first independent scientific confirmation of what has long been suspected: that the Syrian army has been fitting helicopter-borne barrel bombs with chlorine gas, and then dropping them on towns and villages. Chlorine gas reacts with moisture in the throat and lungs, which in turn forms into hydrochloric acid, leaving victims exposed to fits of coughing, choking and, ultimately, gasping for breath. Several people have died.

Using chemicals in this way is a clear breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria signed last year. It is also an infringement of the international norms that have regarded the use of chlorine as monstrously barbaric since the First World War, when it was used to asphyxiate men in the trenches. Although the gas has many industrial uses, it is not a banned substance. Using it as a weapon, however, is strictly prohibited under the convention’s general purpose criterion.

With international attention having been clearly focussed on Ukraine in recent weeks, Assad has seemingly calculated that he can continue to carry out gas attacks with relative impunity, even though he pledged to end their use. He has come to realise there is little or no appetite in the West to intervene militarily in this savage civil war that has now claimed more than 150,000 lives. But he cannot be allowed to think there are no consequences for such ruthless actions.

A fresh effort to revive the stalled Geneva peace process is needed. Securing a diplomatic settlement in Syria remains the best way of ending the internecine warfare and the continued misery that are being suffered by its people. Pressure needs to be applied to Damascus to grant unfettered access to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is sending a fact-finding mission to investigate the most recent attacks.

Syria’s protectors must also examine themselves. Vladimir Putin, in particular, must ask himself whether, despite his continued belligerence, he is really happy to sit and watch as his ally in Damascus gasses his own people.

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