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The ‘great game’ in Syria
Several regional and global players are involved in Syria to secure their national and strategic interests or to maintain the soi-disant “peace and stability”. Whatever the motives behind foreign intrusions, the cost is paid — heavily — by innocent Syrians.
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Beneath the swarming bullets, missiles and fighter jets of government, opposition factions and international coalitions seeking to compound their control in the region — the civilian death toll in Syria has reached 225,948 including 28,949 children and 28,011 women by September 2019, and there are no signs of stoppage anytime soon. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) data, Syrian regime forces and Iranian militias were responsible for 90% of the civilian deaths. In a December 2018 report, the group found that at least 560,000 people were killed in Syria including civilians and the parties fighting on Syrian soil.
Despite the reduction in violence in the past year and 5.7 million refugees and 6.2 million IDPs, about 2.1 million children are out of school and 13.2 million people need health assistance, 33% of the population is food insecure and 83% is living below the poverty line.
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As President Trump said in 2017, the US had “very little to do with Syria other than killing IS” and vindicated his decision of troop withdrawal in December 2018 after defeating Daesh there. He is not prepared to fulfil his promise to finish America’s “endless wars” despite killing top ISIS leadership. Although US repetitively reprimanded Assad’s human rights violations in Syria, it has been disinclined towards direct involvement, except for firing 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase in April 2017, over the suspected use of chemical weapons by Assad forces.
Iran strongly supported the Assad regime since the violence began and provided extensive military aid to the Syrian government.
On September 23, the International Coalition against ISIS entered its sixth year. Since the onset, it provided support to specific armed factions to achieve objectives. Therefore, after a five-year military campaign, irrespective of Daesh’s incomplete elimination, the coalition controls 70% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves and nobody cares for the civilians.
Consequently, millions of Syrians are entombed amid the rivalry of geopolitical and strategic regional and global players.
The “great game” is, therefore, crucifying and routing Syrians citizens as they increasingly become victims of “national interests” of their own administration and foreign interlopers, and continue to suffer from mass casualties, rapes, displacements, rising poverty and loss of access to basic human needs.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 21st, 2019.
Posted on January 23, 2020
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