After ten years of horror still no solution and peace for Syria

It is remarkable that the Syrian uprising, which commenced in March 2011, is still raging and over the years has grown into a conflict destabilising the entire region.

In the early months of 2011 a wave of social unrest swept across the Arab world as people protested against repressive and authoritarian regimes, economic stagnation, unemployment and corruption.

The Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, is a person who has no ears for the citizens of his country and showed also to have no heart for them. The series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s left him cold.

With a reaction to the self-immolation of a young market trader in Tunisia, the protests then spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, where either the ruler was deposed (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, and Ali Abdullah Saleh) or major uprisings and social violence occurred including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iranian Khuzestan, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan. Minor protests took place in Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

When we now see pictures of Syria, we can see a great area in ruins and people living in horrible conditions. Clearly, the population lost this war, and the West did not much, to save the rights of the citizens.

After ten years the same dictator is in power and lives in richness whilst his people are starving. The office had said on March 8 that al-Assad, 55, and his 45-year-old wife, who announced her recovery from breast cancer in 2019, had tested positive for COVID-19 after showing minor symptoms and that they would work in isolation at home.

Syria has seen a sharp rise in infections since mid-February, a member of the government’s coronavirus advisory committee told Reuters in early March as the country kicked off its vaccination campaign. Health and aid officials say it remains difficult to gauge the full scale of the outbreak given the lack of testing facilities in a health system devastated by a decade of war.

After ten years we can see that the Russians are still helping al-Assad and are not bothering the Turkish who entered the North of Syria to put pressure on the Kurds, so that they would not dare to make their own country. Turkey, also keeps supporting some rebel groups. With each assisting rival parties in the conflict, there is a considerable risk of the two powers coming into direct confrontation. And somewhere in the middle of the conflict, ISIS has three enclaves where they are rebuilding their nation.

Ankara keeps allowing capitalizing on refugees to cross into the EU, thus putting pressure on European countries to assist Turkey or face again a new refugee crisis.

In the meantime, Egypt is racing to prepare a grandiose new capital city in the desert east of Cairo before the first civil servants move in this summer and ahead of the delayed official opening of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s flagship project.
At the heart of the city, workers are putting finishing touches to an avenue of ministries that echo the architecture of pharaonic temples and adjoin a raised Islamic complex, two domed parliament buildings and a sprawling presidential compound.

No prospect of a new capital for Syria though. Just a country in rambles. A decade of war means that the lives of an entire generation of Syrians have been defined by bombs, deprivation, death, and displacement, and at the moment there is no prospect at all of better times.

Until now nothing is done against the many war-crimes el Assad and his regime did. The only good news we may come to see is that the British police opened a preliminary investigation into the Syrian first lady and icon, Asma al Assad. She is accused of having incited, aided and encouraged the commission of war crimes.

There were the many chemical weapons used against civilians; tens of thousands of arbitrary detentions and disappearances, repression, rape, torture and murder. Most of the time, when there was a victim detained, his or her relatives were not informed that he or she was been killed, therefore leaving the victim’s family in despair for years, unable to fully grieve their loved ones. It is not understandable why there was not earlier a withdrawal of al Assad’s British nationality. (The first lady was born in London and is a binational of Syria and the United Kingdom.)

According to a recent report by the United Nations Commission on Inquiry in Syria, the war has been marked by the most heinous violations of humanitarian standards and human rights, including violence by the regime on its own population on a genocidal scale.
As always, civilians bear the brunt of the atrocities. According to UNICEF there is the average of one child injured or killed every eight hours over past 10 years.

Ten years on, Syrian crisis ‘remains a living nightmare’

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