- The Syrian regime must be made to pay a price for their use of chemical weapons, but limited air strikes will not bring the war to a close.
- Assad has his back against the wall: His regime is a “family Mafia” terrified of losing their grip on power and the inevitable persecution that would ensue.
- Utilitarian arguments in favor of letting Assad win to minimize human suffering ignore the “appalling means” the Syrian regime has used to maintain power, Hickey says.
- Hickey predicts the end of the Syrian conflict is not yet in sight, and that Idlib will likely be the next scene of massive human suffering.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was roundly condemned by Western leaders in the aftermath of the April 7 chemical weapons attack on Douma, which left 70 people dead. “A monster,” President Trump called Assad, whose regime likely perpetrated the attack. “A Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it.” On April 13, the United States and its allies, France and the United Kingdom, launched targeted airstrikes against three chemical sites in Syria. “The use of chemical weapons cannot be allowed to go unchallenged,” said British Ambassador to the United Nations Karen Pierce.
Today on Displaced is Stephen Hickey, who served in Syria as the deputy British ambassador from 2010 until he was expelled from the country in 2012 from which he had a front row seat to the Assad regime’s vicious crackdown on the Syrian opposition following the pro-democracy uprisings in 2011. Hickey walks through the arc of the conflict, and together with Displaced hosts Ravi Gurumurthy and Grant Gordon, makes sense of how it may be possible to bring the Syria conflict to a close. This episode was recorded before Friday’s missile strikes, but takes a step back to explain the crisis in Syria and how to think about the strategic options on the table.
The debate on international intervention has been often been fueled by the use of chemical weapon in Syria. But in the context of the appalling scale of human suffering that is the Syrian conflict, chemical weapons attacks cause relatively few atrocities. Since 2011, roughly 500,000 people have been killed in fighting in Syria. Over half of those are civilians. Meanwhile, chemical weapons have killed an estimated 1,500 people since 2011.
What we've seen in recent decades are many of the problems and the cost of Western intervention. But I would argue in Syria in the last seven years we've seen very clearly the cost of non-intervention. Non-intervention is a choice.
The conversation dives into this challenging tension and Hickey argues that it’s crucial to hold the line on chemical weapons use, which has been outlawed under international law since 1925. “I understand the importance of maintaining a ban on chemical weapons simply because of the horrific nature of the weapon and its ability to be scaled up and to cause horrendous suffering,” he says. But the uproar over chemical weapons use throws the world’s grim acceptance of the high death toll from so-called conventional weapons and other war crimes into sharp relief.
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Related Reading
- Trump Strikes Syria Over Chemical Weapons -- Robin Wright, The New Yorker
- The War in Syria, Explained -- Zack Beauchamp, Vox
- In a Syrian Town, People Started Shouting: “Chemicals! Chemicals!” -- Ben Hubbard, New York Times
- Sad to say, but to save Syrians, let Bashar Assad win -- Max Boot, Washington Post
- For a Second Strike on Syria, Trump Will Have To Go Big -- Rhys Dubin, Dan de Luce, Foreign Policy
- Obstacles to Ending Syria’s Civil War -- James Fearon, Foreign Policy
- Political Science Says Syria’s Civil War Will Probably Last Another Decade -- Max Fisher, Washington Post
- Syria’s Paradox: Why The War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse -- Max Fisher, New York Times
Opinions and views expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect those of the International Rescue Committee.
