Protecting Syria’s Most Vulnerable
Although it has been one year since the recapture of Ar Raqqah, ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate, humanitarian needs still remain, especially among the women and children displaced by the fighting. It’s USAID Humanitarian Protection Advisor Liz Pender’s job to ensure U.S.-funded aid reaches them.
Because of security concerns, this flight can only happen at night. Liz Pender, a Humanitarian Protection Advisor for USAID, waits in a warehouse in the Middle East with about 50 camo-and armor-clad U.S. service members.
Exhausted and bleary eyed from multiple days of travel, they load into the back of a U.S. military cargo plane for the last leg of their trip. It is cold, windowless and dark, except for an eerie green light. Even with the provided ear protection, it is loud.
“It’s like you’re sitting in a giant tin can and its roaring all around you,” Pender said.
The flight is the first sign that this trip will be different than others. Their destination is the heart of one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time. After three hours in the air and an alarmingly steep descent, they hit the dirt runway of their final destination: northeast Syria.
Beginning in 2011, the Syrian conflict has become the largest and most complex humanitarian emergency of our time, with nearly 80 percent of the population in need of humanitarian aid. Syria is considered a protection crisis, which means that civilians, designated as “protected persons” under international humanitarian law, are being intentionally targeted by armed groups. It can manifest as sexual violence, forced recruitment of children as soldiers, or the deliberate killing of civilians. Syria includes all of these.
Pender works with USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, the U.S. government’s lead agency for coordinating and responding to disasters around the world. She has spent the bulk of her professional career abroad, implementing programs and delivering services during some of the world’s most pressing crises. In Syria, where she’s working as a humanitarian protection advisor, her job mirrors that of a social worker, but with a caseload that will take her to some of the most devastated parts of northeast Syria.
In their own words
Very often, when crises strike, there is an assumption that the youngest children are the most vulnerable, leading people to lose sight of other at-risk groups, like teens.
“There has been a particular impact on adolescent boys and girls in Syria,” Pender explained. “Adolescent girls are being exposed to forced marriages at earlier and earlier ages. They are intentionally targeted for sexual violence. ISIS went after teenage girls, sometimes younger. I heard the story of an 8-year-old who was married to an ISIS member because she was considered ‘acceptable.’”
During one field visit to a displacement camp this spring, Pender found herself in a trailer, sitting in a circle with four women, two of whom were new arrivals to the camp from Dayr az Zawr, a city that was besieged by ISIS for more than three years. The conversation started casually; Pender wanted to make sure they were comfortable answering sensitive questions. After a few minutes of pleasantries, she asked them if they thought things at home were harder now.
The women replied by saying that things were hard for everyone now. Pender agreed, but gently added that it’s been her experience that women take on a lot, especially when things get bad, and they take care of everyone else before themselves.
Pender said that one of the women responded, ‘Well, that’s just being a woman. That’s just my role. My husband is angry all the time now. But I do my best to absorb all of his anger so that he doesn’t hurt the kids.’
“Perhaps it’s not fair for me to make assumptions,” Pender added as she thought back to that conversation, “but I take that as ‘I put myself in front of his fists because it’s better me, than the kids.’ I feel like this is a really common story.”
At another camp she held a focus group with teenage girls in a building that had been severely damaged by the fighting. They discussed how their lives were different now. One girl said she dreamed of being an engineer when she was younger. Now she assumes she’ll either get married or go fight.
Throughout the focus groups, there were emotional moments; some women broke down in tears as they talked. But when Pender asked if they wanted to end the interview, they always said no, that they wanted people to hear their stories. So they kept talking and Pender kept listening.
No end in sight
“When you are in a place like Syria and witnessing a crisis of this magnitude, you feel such a tremendous sense of responsibility,” Pender said. “You feel guilty that you have the opportunity — and the choice — to leave, and they don’t.”
Pender has been working on and off on the Syria crisis as a protection advisor since it started in 2011. This fall, she will return to Syria once again, although this time in a new role, as the USAID Humanitarian Advisor, coordinating USAID’s emergency relief assistance inside Syria and working alongside the U.S. Department of State and Army Civil Affairs.
“I am strangely happy to be going back,” she said. “I never feel like I’ve done enough.”
Although it’s only been a few months since she was last in Syria as a protection advisor, in many ways this will be a completely different mission for her.
“I think that from a humanitarian point of view, we are about to enter a period of time when things are going to change really drastically,” she said, referring to the potential military offensive in the northwest Syrian city of Idlib. “We are going to bear witness to things that will be really hard to see. I don’t know what to expect, and I’m bracing myself for that.”
