Who’s worse, Assad or the opposition?
The information war in Syria is rapidly obscuring the fact that although all sides have committed crimes, the Assad regime far exceeds them.
When Bana Alabed tweeted that she had safely left Aleppo, Syria, international media seized on the news. Her Twitter account, written with the help of her mother, Fatemah, came to symbolize the plight of civilians trapped in besieged eastern Aleppo. Known as “a modern-era Anne Frank,” her humble messages about life under bombardment drew particular attention at a time when the dead bodies or shellshocked faces of children — from Aylan Kurdi to Omran Daqneesh — became symbols of the horror of the Syrian war.
While some celebrated Bana’s safety, others forcefully renewed their claim that Bana’s Twitter account was terrorist propaganda — or fiction altogether. Though outrageous (and debunked to the extent possible), this dynamic has become commonplace.
Stoked in particular by a smear piece earlier this year on the White Helmets, the civil defense group that digs civilians from the rubble of bombed buildings, much of Western media coverage has devolved into mudslinging efforts to discredit the other side: Those who support the U.S.- and Gulf states-backed opposition or who advocate for a no-fly zone have been labeled as interventionists or imperialists supporting regime change in Syria. Those who focus exclusively on the U.S. hand in the war and gloss over the regime’s crimes are Assadists and are regularly referred to as Nazis or fascists.
The information war over Syria is obscuring the scale and perpetration of crimes committed by all sides of the war, furthered by the restricted access of international journalists. As the regime of Bashar al-Assad escalated its violence to suppress the uprising, the country became increasingly dangerous for Western media. Syria truly emptied of Western journalists, however, after ISIS took the stage with its theater of executions.
Since then, the journalists and activists inside Syria have been unable to fill the void. Though the uprising fostered the growth of independent media outlets, citizen journalists faced repression and violence first by the regime and then by Islamic opposition groups that now control liberated areas. With journalists boxed in, any media coming from inside Syria has become suspect to some in the West, including the recent “goodbye” messages and videos from eastern Aleppo, and Bana’s Twitter account. The scarcity of independent, verifiable information has turned Syria into an all-out propaganda war that has warped all sense of responsibility for the perpetration of crimes by warring parties.
Some institutions, however, have continued to verify and document atrocities and crimes. Human Rights Watch and others offer a baseline catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides. These include:
- systematic torture and death across the regime’s vast prison system;
- the use of child soldiers by armed opposition groups;
- the use of rape, overwhelmingly by the regime, as a weapon of war
- unlawful demolitions by the regime of neighborhoods in Damascus and Hama meant as collective civilian punishment;
- indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations by the regime, including through the horrific and crude use of barrel bombs (as of March, The Syrian Network for Human Rights, SNHR, has counted 35,956 barrel bombs);
- indiscriminate attacks on civilians by armed opposition groups;
- regime airstrikes on schools, with Russian support;
- arbitrary detention and abuse in detention in Kurdish-controlled areas;
- the deliberate siege and starvation of civilians by multiple parties to the war, as well as the plight of Palestinian refugees besieged and starved in Yarmouk;
- the bombing of U.N. aid convoys by Russian or Syrian bombs.
- 169 documented chemical weapons attacks, overwhelmingly by the regime;
- attacks on medical facilities and doctors, again overwhelmingly by the regime.
In short, the scale of civilian suffering and death under the world’s gaze beggars belief.
But while all sides have committed crimes, with civilians caught in the fray, the opposition simply does not have the capability to inflict the level of destruction, death and collective punishment as the Assad regime. In addition to the human toll, Syria’s major cities lie in ruins (a deliberate echo of the 1982 Hama massacre), with infrastructure devastated and the economy wrecked for years to come. This does not condone any crimes or atrocities committed by armed opposition groups — the burning of buses sent to evacuate civilians from eastern Aleppo being the latest — but the violence and impact of these groups must be understood relative to the regime.
Even if disagreement does not exist over the commission of crimes, discrepancies over the death toll also contribute to the information malaise. Since the U.N. stopped counting the dead in 2014 and as access to data and on-the-ground sources dwindled, Syrians rights groups have continued to document the loss of life through their networks. As such, estimates vary.
- As of November, the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), a Syrian human rights group, cited 170,741 “battle-related deaths,” of which 63.4 percent were civilians, though they have in the past acknowledged that their figures may be low because “they are not able to record the deaths among those fighting for the Syrian regime.”
- The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ (SOHR) claims that as of Dec. 13, it has documented 312,001 deaths, of which 90,506 are civilians. (However The Washington Post cited a SOHR report from February that put the figure at 271,138, of which a higher number — 122,997 — were civilians.)
- The Syrian Center for Policy Research in London (SCPR), made headlines in February with a report that put the figure closer to a staggering 470,000, with 70,000 people dying indirectly because of failures of infrastructure and lack of access to basic care.
The numbers of regime and opposition fighters killed is also unknown. Earlier analyses put combatant deaths higher than civilian deaths. However, the VDC’s report tipped the majority toward civilians and maintains that the Syrian government is responsible for 89.7 percent of civilian deaths. This far exceeds the number of civilians killed by opposition groups, ISIS and American airstrikes in eastern Syria by any measure.
Regardless, the war’s toll on civilians has come to define the narrative — and understandably so. The regime’s relentless bombardment of civilians in eastern Aleppo over the last year, and the refugee crisis it precipitated, become the core focus for media reporting. The Syria Campaign’s efforts to highlight the work of the White Helmets and medical workers, to portray life under siege, and to call for a no-fly zone helped drive this attention.
But the debate over a controversial military intervention has split the antiwar left between the so-called “interventionists” and “Assadists” and threatens to skew the conversation away from Syria toward an obsessive meditation on Western power. Both camps share much in common: an opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as two decades of U.S. interference in regimes around the world and its particular legacy of client states in the Middle East. More than ever, civil society has been able to uncloak U.S. actions abroad and the self-interest that lies behind its democracy and human rights rhetoric. U.S. political support and funding, once the lynchpin of the global system, has instead become a poison. However, Barack Obama’s reluctance to enter the Syrian war (aside from airstrikes on ISIS) has not gained him any credit, either, and his administration’s feckless diplomatic efforts have effectively benched the U.S. for now. Quite unexpectedly, Syria has brought the U.S. to its knees, yet the left that opposed U.S. power has descended into vitriolic division.
But while American power should always be rendered bare, the relentless focus on keeping the U.S. in check misrepresents the real parameters of the war. All parties are receiving external support. More crucially, Russia’s entry into the war in 2015 provided Assad the military force required to win Aleppo. Just because Russia was invited into Syrian territory to massacre civilians does not provide it any legitimacy.
Unfortunately, the debate is resurrecting the Cold War binary of power. Many of the responses to the Syrian crisis still center around wishful thinking of Western intervention. Alongside general global uncertainty, Aleppo’s devastation has reignited questions of Western leadership, from the British conservative George Osborne’s definitive comment that Aleppo was the result of “a vacuum of Western and British leadership” to the Russian activist Garry Kasparov’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the West’s lost opportunity to redefine the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union.
With Western institutions facing justified criticism, solutions in Syria — and accountability when the dust settles — must be a reflection of the global community. A group of German lawyers recently submitted a criminal complaint against Assad under the rarely invoked principle of universal jurisdiction, and the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution with the support of 105 countries establishing an independent mechanism to investigate war crimes and lay the groundwork for accountability. Whether this means a referral to the International Criminal Court or the creation of a special tribunal remains to be seen, and both routes are problematic in their own ways.
And there may be other, more creative, solutions to global inertia on the horizon. A billionaire in Sweden, for example, is offering $5 million for the best idea to rethink international governance, whether through U.N. reform or the creation of new institutions altogether. Though seemingly quixotic, momentum continues to grow to challenge oppressive structures, whether on a national or global scale. It’s the spirit that sparked the Syrian uprising and must be nurtured despite setbacks along the way.
Shilpa Jindia is a Latterly contributing editor and former of co-editor of openSecurity. She holds an MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and previously she worked with Reprieve in London and the Iraqi Student Project in Damascus.
