The four horsemen of the apocalypse are sweeping through Syria. A decade of war has left the country in tatters and displaced half the population. Half a million are dead and millions more have been maimed and traumatised. 2020 has demonstrated that Syria’s catastrophe is set to get much worse.
During President Assad’s offensive in Idlib, a campaign supported by Russian airpower, a record number of civilians were displaced by violence across north-west Syria. The country’s official currency, the lira, has collapsed and its value is at a record low against the U.S dollar. According to Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, food insecurity, driven by conflict, pandemic and economic woes, has surged to “record levels”, rising from 7.9 million to 9.3 million in six months. To compound the woes of Syrian civilians, the Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act introduced by the U.S Treasury Department has brought in the ‘most expansive legislation yet’ in the economic war against Assad.
President Assad won the initial conflict in Syria with the rebels, albeit with the military assistance of Iran, Hezbollah, Shia paramilitaries from Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the decisive intervention of Russia. It came at a staggering cost as Assad and his allies targeted protesters indiscriminately and levelled cities and towns to survive, committing flagrant war crimes and crimes against humanity. Dissenters and activists were incarcerated and tortured en-masse in the network of government prisons and detention centres across Syria. Thousands have gone missing and been tortured to death in these de-facto concentration camps as the Assad circle unleashed extremism and death across the country, creating a space for groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qa’ida to thrive. At the same time, Assad ignited a regional war across the Middle East drawing in local superpowers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, turning the country into a global battlefield where multiple wars-within-a-war have raged.
The Middle East’s Thirty Years’ War has all-but destroyed Syria, but it is continuing to mutate. The string of military victories for Assad came to an abrupt halt in 2020 after Russia and Turkey locked horns during the Idlib offensive. After hundreds of regime soldiers and several Hezbollah fighters were killed along with dozens upon dozens of Turkish soldiers - the country’s highest losses incurred since President Erdogan’s intervention in Syria began - a ceasefire was declared on 5th March. Within six days, the world had changed. Covid-19 fast-spreading since November 2019, was labelled as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on 11th March.
Iran, the Assad regime’s closest ally in the Middle East, was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic with 9,000 confirmed dead so far (though it is speculated the death toll is much higher than official statements and estimates) and became the epicentre for the spread of the virus across the region.
Historically, the Middle East has always been at the crossroads of civilisation and a hub for globalisation before it became a popular term, acting as a pivot to both Central and South Asia and Europe. Migrants, pilgrims, merchants and armies have used the region for thousands of years, and with it, diseases have often been carried. As the ta’ub (plague) devastated medieval Muslim societies in the region during the Black Death in the 14th century as it spread from Central Asia, Crimea and the Caucasus, so to has Covid-19 with experts fearing the worst in February.
Despite the presence of Iranian soldiers and Damascus’ two Shia main shrines, Sayyida Zaynab and Ruqaya, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon each year, the Assad regime initially claimed that there were zero cases of Covid-19 in Syria. The country’s first case was confirmed by the Health Minister, Nizar Yaziji, in late March as Assad’s neighbours, Iraq, Israel and Lebanon went into lockdown and cases and deaths began to rise in all three countries. Assad himself alleged that "no cases" existed, allowing aspects of life to continue as normal. Behind the scenes, local reports of the epidemic’s spread in regime-held areas and refugee camps in the north-west and north-east Syria emerged as unconfirmed cases were alleged to be rising. According to some activists, doctors in Covid-19 hotspots were silenced by the regime as officials wrangled over the correct response to the health crisis.
The government took precautionary measures, shutting down most flights, banned foreign nationals from entering, curtailed public transport, cancelled events and ordered government offices to operate at 40 per cent capacity. With Syria’s healthcare system decimated by a decade of war and thousands of doctors, nurses and healthcare workers forced to flee, these precautionary measures - including the quarantine of civilians returning from abroad in facilities in abject condition - did little to stave off the virus. In rebel-held areas, practical measures such as social distancing have been extremely difficult to impose in swollen refugee camps and with poor access to water and safe sanitation and not enough medical facilities or supplies, Covid-19 had been hard for aid workers to track and treat. This has been exacerbated by delays and restrictions placed on the delivery of life-saving medical supplies for Covid-19 cases.
The knock-on effect of Covid-19 has created further challenges for ordinary civilians, refugees and displaced persons. Healthcare for many refugees in host countries has been difficult to access and pandemic lockdown measures have created widespread food insecurity and affected livelihoods. Without income and unable to pay rent, many refugees - who have either had their poultry incomes slashed or been forced out of work - will be forced like many other Syrian refugees already living below the poverty line into work with serious protection risks, including child labour, trafficking, smuggling, and makeshift oil refinery work, so that they can provide for their families.
Under Assad, Syrians are no better off. Corruption, already deeply engrained in Syrian society, has seeped into the government’s Covid-19 response. In a policy brief published by the Centre for Global Policy, the report showed that government officials, soldiers, and internal security were using bribery to extract cash and extorting desperate workers and families who wanted to pass checkpoints, get grants to access medical care and to travel so that their livelihoods could stay afloat. As cronyism ate away, crisis-hit ordinary men, women, and children continued to struggle. Hunger deepened as the private sector was gutted and public sector employees have been reliant on second and third jobs to stay financially afloat.
A broader economic catastrophe had already consumed Damascus before the Covid-19 epidemic. Warlordism was rife and militias loyal to the regime were profiteering from civilian needs and the opposition’s need for medical supplies, food, gas, weapons and drugs. Kidnap and extortion was never far away, and the war economy has flourished to finance the regime and skirt around economic sanctions. Iran and Russia have been providing assistance to the Syrian government, with Tehran providing an estimated $8 billion each year to Damascus while Moscow has given limited economic support in exchange for cross-sector investment contracts and opportunities to reconstruct Syria after the war has concluded. The military enterprise to safeguard Russian military bases and interests has also cost the Kremlin billions.
The collapse of Lebanon’s economy and widespread protests against corruption after the announcement of new tax measures paralysed Syria’s economy. For decades under Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, Syria had sucked the blood from Lebanon’s economy after secret police, in coordination with businessmen, set up a transnational criminal racketeering operation plundering post-war Lebanon (a conflict Syria had been involved in during the 1970s and 1980s) of reconstruction funds and government coffers. After the Syrian occupation was dislodged in 2005, Syrian influence remained but as sanctions tightened and government spending to survive went up during the civil war, Lebanon’s economy was a ticking time bomb as outlined by Chloe Cornish, a journalist at The Financial Times:
Syria and Lebanon are bound by tight commercial ties. Lebanese lawyers open shell companies for Syrians, its ports admit Syria-destined fuel, and its foreign currency black market supplies Syrians with cash. Syria’s private banks are mostly Lebanese affiliates, and Syrian companies use Lebanese banks to circumvent international sanctions.
Lebanon’s fiscal crisis spilt into Syria and like the Lebanese lira, the Syrian lira - already dropping in value against the U.S dollar throughout the conflict - tumbled in January. This accelerated in May as a combination of dependency on imported goods (ex. gas and oil) and the Assad regime cannibalising itself to survive meant ordinary people felt the consequences. Electricity and heat became a luxury, people couldn’t afford to call or text with their phones and a fuel crisis also impacted the public transport system making travel more difficult for Syrian civilians going about their day-to-day lives. Sugar, tea and coffee and basic goods like vegetables are unaffordable and like Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the sanctions era, people are to be seen scavenging through garbage to find food. “Syrians are going hungry in a way they were not even a year ago,” said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor. “The price of imported staple foods is beyond the reach of most people.”
Syria has already been pushed to near-famine conditions in small pockets in Rukban, Eastern Ghouta, Idlib and Madaya throughout the civil war, however, the World Food Programme has warned that a broader economic collapse could spark widespread famine. The phenomenon of famine has not occurred in this part of the world since the First World War in Lebanon and the death marches of Armenians in northern Syria when locust plagues and drought combined with the Ottoman authorities’ policy to divert grain resources to feed soldiers and the Allies’ blockade in the Mediterranean left the population starving. A quarter of a million men, women and children perished in the Great Famine in Lebanon alone with reports of people resorting to eating cats, dogs, rats and their children to survive. With Assad’s disastrous mismanagement of Syria’s economy, rampant corruption and brutal war tactics, including using food as a weapon of war, which has produced rampant malnutrition, the country is being pushed into territory which is either unprecedented or has not been seen for generations.
The Caesar Act, critics have argued, and other ‘smart’ sanctions implemented by the European Union and the United States will devastate Syria’s long-term recovery, even if the regime was eventually toppled. The same ‘smart’ sanctions wrought havoc on ordinary Iraqis suffering under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship before he was removed by the U.S military coalition. Saddam Hussein, like Assad, was a flagrant war criminal and bore a huge responsibility in bringing Iraq to its knees after the Iran-Iraq War and First Gulf War courted economic and military disasters. However, not only did sanctions fail to remove Saddam or spark an uprising against him, draconian economic punishment turned many Iraqis against their future ‘liberators’. Similarly, while sanctions by the Trump administration have placed huge pressure on the Iranian economy and sparked popular protests (which were subsequently crushed by Iranian security forces), critics - as with Syria and Iraq - have argued that Trump’s strategy of ‘maximum pressure’ is impacting the wrong people.
While Assad bears the ultimate blame for pulling Syrians into hell with the regime, the Caesar Act will certainly not drag the country out of it with or without the regime in power. First and foremost, as War on the Rocks writes, ‘sanctions are Washington’s primary source of leverage in Syria’, a function of bringing the Assad regime to the table and punishing key figures in government for crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and what many are now calling a genocide.
From Qaddafi’s Libya to Saddam’s Iraq, both in ruins from civil wars, this tactic - without a broader strategy for what happens to these countries after the dictators were gone - has created disaster. Lebanon’s civil war lasted fifteen years, Afghanistan conflicts have continued unabated since the Soviet-Afghan War and Iraq has been in a perpetual cycle of conflict since 1980. Post-Assad Syria would be no different, and from the beginning under both Obama and Trump, any notion of an authentic American strategy in Syria has been regularly disproven. From the initial response to the 2011 protests to Obama’s infamous ‘red-line’ moment in 2013 to Trump’s erratic withdrawal of American soldiers which sparked renewed conflict between Turkish soldiers and Kurdish insurgents, Washington has created more problems than it has resolved in Syria. Sanctions represent one of those half-measures, a big gamble which could drag Syria further into the abyss.
In the halls of power, Assad has felt the pressure. The dispute with his cousin, Rami Makhlouf and renewed protests in regime-held areas have shown that the government is vulnerable. In Sudan and Serbia, Omar Al-Bashir and Slobodan Milosevic, authoritarians who were responsible for bringing untold terror and repression to their countries were eventually toppled by their supporters in the army and government as protests paralysed the country. In Syria, a similar scenario could happen but is dependent on numerous factors including the Russians, Hezbollah and the Iranians who regard Syria as a vital strategic regional interest. Moscow’s media may have become sharper in its criticism of Assad but according to Al-Sharq’s Strategic Research Forum, it is unlikely Putin will abandon the regime despite its brinksmanship.
For Iran, who have invested even more strategically and ideologically in the country’s survival, conceding defeat to the Trump administration would be intolerable for its regional military strategy to contain rivals such as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel. Russia and Iran hold the cards to a political solution, a bitter pill for the U.S and European policymakers to swallow, however, the U.S, Europeans, Gulf States, Israelis and Turkey have demonstrated that if they and the Assad regime don’t bend or compromise, Syria will be permanently crippled, a much-diminished economic investment and military asset for the Iranians and Russians.
There is no easy answer to the Syrian people’s suffering. It is tied to the region’s future much changed by revolution and conflict, and Syria’s future, tragically, lies in the hands of external powers inciting conflicts across the region in the Middle East’s Cold War. The consequences, including renewed conflict, the threat of famine, ongoing pandemic, economic disaster, biting sanctions and ongoing power struggles in the Assad regime have demonstrated that Syria’s collapse has only deepened in the new decade.