The earthquake aid crisis in Syria requires international attention

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria last week, has exacerbated the devastating effects of Syria’s 12-year-old civil war, particularly in the hard-hit northwest. Mainly controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an alliance of armed groups formerly linked to al-Qaeda, the Syrian state controls Syrians in the northwest, compounding a misery that has lasted more than a decade.

The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has effectively besieged the area that includes the city and province of Idlib, preventing humanitarian aid passing through Damascus from reaching the already besieged area. Instead, basic necessities such as fuel and medicine must come to the region via Turkey.

The official death toll from the earthquake is over 33,000 in both Turkey and Syria, though the actual number is undoubtedly much higher. In northwest Syria, successive crises — including a debilitating civil war, internal displacement, the reign of ISIS, Russian bombing campaigns, government blockades, ongoing conflict, and a massive earthquake — have caused untold suffering to the region.

“This is the perfect storm that I’ve been worried about for a very long time,” Natasha Hall, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox in an interview. “You have [a large portion of] 5 million people have been relying on emergency aid for years now. About two-thirds of these have been displaced from other parts of Syria; About 80 percent have been displaced between six and 25 times.”

Some search and rescue operations have reportedly been suspended for a week, as groups such as the White Helmets suspect there will be any survivors. Experts told Vox that the ability to care for survivors is constrained without massive inflows of foreign aid. “Civil society is active in a sense, whatever support they receive from abroad, whether from Europe or the United States, and from Turkey that comes through Bab al-Hawa.” [Syria-Turkey border crossing] Sahar Mohammadli, an expert on international humanitarian law and protection of civilians in conflict, told Vox in an interview.

Confusion and fear of sanctions against the Assad regime, as well as a misunderstanding of the political situation, are preventing financial and other aid from reaching some of the people hardest hit by the earthquake as well.

“like [Assad’s] The main international backers, the governments of Iran and Russia, have tried hard to shift blame for Syria’s economic woes from Assad’s role in the country’s destruction to sanctions,” the organization, and a former State Department expert on Middle East policy, wrote in The Washington Post on Friday. The sanctions certainly contributed to hindering government expenditures and the depreciation of the Syrian pound, but they did not have a significant impact on the delivery of humanitarian aid,” given that the sanctions involve humanitarian cuts that allow aid to enter Damascus.

The government blockade is making the crisis much worse.

The Assad regime has regained about 70% of Syria’s territory after losing its grip on the country – first because of the revolution that began in 2011, and then ISIS. The SDF, made up mainly of Syrian Kurds, controls some of the remaining territory, namely the northeastern region. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and some Turkish-backed groups control the northwest. HTS has controlled at least parts of the region since its official defection from al-Qaeda in 2017. The US government designated HTS a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 2018, as an addition to the designation of the group’s predecessor, Jabhat al-Nusra. .

Regardless of the group’s actual affiliation with al-Qaeda, it is conducting violent acts in the region. However, the regime’s siege — a “starve or surrender” tactic, as Mohammadli put it — has led to harsh and degrading conditions in Idlib. “This area is an open-air prison and separate from anywhere else,” Zaher Sahloul, president of aid organization MedGlobal, told Vox in an interview. MedGlobal has teams on the ground in Gaziantep, the southern Turkish city close to the Syrian border that is home to 462,000 Syrian refugees, as well as in northwest Syria.

The armed groups in charge of the area, Mohammadli said, “maintain limited civilian and public functions, such as maintaining water systems, but rely on humanitarian organizations to provide services.” “They don’t have the resources to play the role that the government could play in providing basic services.”

Moreover, Russian and regime forces have attacked civilian targets including hospitals and sanitation facilities – leading to an ongoing cholera outbreak that began in the northeast – as well as doctors and civil defense organizations such as the White Helmets, weakening the healthcare infrastructure. The regime has also cut electricity to the area and stopped paying public sector workers, so search and rescue operations and medical services depend on generators running on diesel fuel.

Groups like MedGlobal have built hospitals and clinics in more resilient spaces — in the mountains and underground — as well as providing medical care and fuel for search and rescue operations, but the level of need is incredibly high and will only grow with time, Sahloul said.

The question remains whether the rest of the world will step up to provide continued assistance. “It is the failure of the international community to focus only on emergency aid,” said Mammadli. Aid agencies of donor governments have to look at this tragedy and say, “What needs to be done?” It is now emergency aid and response, but it must transition to an aid model to make communities more resilient.”

We must stop the politicization of humanitarian aid

Because the region is so conflicted, this has led to confusion and politicization, both by the Assad regime and because of confusion about how sanctions against HTS and the regime apply to humanitarian aid. This means that a region that relies almost entirely on foreign aid is seeing meager incomes – and what has come in so far is not even disaster aid, but rather resources that were already destined for northwest Syria before the earthquake.

“Dependence on emergency aid becomes dangerous as funding dwindles and if it is only allowed because of a [UN] Security Council resolution, then it can be cut off by veto in the Security Council. If Russia, for example, vetoes a future decision to allow aid across the border from Turkey into northwestern Syria — similar to what happened in July 2022 — it will be even more difficult to get much-needed aid to the region.

Some observers have called for an end to sanctions against Syria in order to get aid to those in need, but experts say this is an incredibly misguided view.

“UN agencies are working in Damascus – all of them,” Hall said. They get billions of dollars in financing, as they do [international nongovernmental organizations] Through European governments, the United Kingdom, the United States, and this has been happening for 12 years, even earlier. So the sanctions are not related to humanitarian aid, there are exemptions for humanitarian aid, but the problem is that banks and other countries are afraid to work in Syria because of the sanctions and because they are afraid of legal risks.”

On Friday, the United States issued an order extending the General License Agreement for Humanitarian Aid by six months. “It’s very broad and all-encompassing, and basically responds to allegations that the Europeans and sanctions were preventing an appropriate response,” Hall said.

So, the removal of sanctions against the regime will not make a difference for the people in northwestern Syria, although demonstrating the ability of banks and companies to contribute to the earthquake response is a positive step. However, the disinformation campaign aimed at relieving pressure on the Assad regime continues, despite the fact that they “are responsible for the atrocities that occurred over the past 12 years, and there was always a way to get around the sanctions imposed on the regime,” said Mammadli.

Dealing with the massive politicization of humanitarian aid in this situation requires thinking creatively about alternatives, Sahloul told Vox. “Why aren’t medical supplies flown in? We have US military bases not far from there, in northeastern Syria, which US forces have used in counterterrorism operations. “If there is a political will to help people, don’t blame the bottleneck or the border crossing, do it yourself!”

But that is exactly the problem, Sahloul said — the lack of political will to actually provide aid to the millions of people in northwestern Syria already afflicted by more than a decade of conflict, displacement and terrorism.

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