This article accompanies an episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast featuring an interview with the author, Ammar Azzouz.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes. At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.

Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage. Meanwhile, according to the health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, more than 6,500 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes and more than 17,400 injured.

There is a modern term for what’s happening in Gaza. Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home. It comes from the Latin word domus which means home and cide, which is deliberate killing.

But, home here doesn’t only mean the physical, tangible built environment of people’s homes and properties, it also refers to people’s sense of belonging and identity. We are seeing in many conflicts and wars across the world that alongside the destruction of architecture, people’s sense of dignity and belonging is also being targeted.

There is a link between genocide and domicide: genocide refers to the killing of people and domicide to the erasure of their presence and their material culture. In 2022, a UN expert on housing argued that domicide should be recognised as an international crime.

When people are continuously displaced from their homes, sometimes for decades, or even a lifetime, there’s a sense of grief and sorrow that their history is being erased.

The destruction of Homs

My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.

Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed. Across the country, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of these, 6.8 million people are displaced inside the country, and 5.4 million people live as refugees in neighbouring countries and beyond.

Domicidal campaigns like this also work to erase evidence that a community actually existed in a particular place and that it had a history and culture there. This is an attempt to write people out of history through destroying their homes and heritage in a way that’s systematic and deliberate. In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground. In other cities, such as Damascus and Hama, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out through new land and property laws which designate these neighbourhoods as “informal”.

Listen to Ammar Azzouz talk about his research on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Domicide in Gaza

There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle. But I’ve been following the news continuously since the Hamas attack on Israel, and I can’t stop looking at the updates about the heavy Israeli bombing. The scale of destruction, the level of mass displacement is just so heartbreaking. Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.

Israel says it has the right to defend itself, and is targeting Hamas positions, but the scale to which ordinary people’s homes, hospitals and “safe areas” have been hit means what’s happening in Gaza is absolutely domicidal. People living in the north of the Gaza Strip were told by Israeli authorities to move to the south of the territory to the supposed “safe areas”, but the southern areas continue to be bombed too. The bombardment is killing civilians, killing their everyday lives and causing the mass destruction of neighbourhoods. As we have seen in videos, entire buildings have been levelled.

NBC: “‘This is a massacre!’: Rescue workers fight to save children in Gaza airstrike rubble”

Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford, who was born in Baghdad, and is considered one of Israel’s critical “new historians”, called Israel’s actions “state-sponsored terrorism”. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.

Catastrophe for Palestinians

It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before. This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.

When one million people are ordered to leave their homes it’s important to understand that these people have attachment to their places, to their neighbourhoods, to their streets. The impact of displacement and loss of home can live with people for their lifetime.

In my interviews with people from the city of Homs, I’ve heard many people say that even if they are still living in Homs, they feel like strangers in their own city, or they feel exiled inside their own city. For people such as the Palestinian diaspora or the Iraqi diaspora or the Syrian diaspora who are unable to return to their home countries, that suffering and pain and trauma of displacement continues.

I imagine people have different mechanisms to cope with these traumatic events, but that’s why it’s so important to have memory projects where people at least can reflect on what happened to heal and grieve, even when, sadly, many are unable to return and some spend their lifetime in exile.

After researching conflicts, wars, dictatorships and occupations for several years, I always say that the pain of people start as a headline in the news media, and turns into a footnote in history. Let us resist that, let us remember the life of every human being and keep the struggle for a free and just world for everyone.

Ammar Azzouz, British Academy Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – In the carefully composed photograph released by their state news agencies at the beginning of May, Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad has his arms outstretched to welcome the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi. The two men are beaming.

Raisi’s visit was a sign of Tehran’s essential support for Assad, more than 12 years after the Syrian leader’s bloody repression of a popular uprising that called for reform and guarantees of human rights. The meeting was also an attempt to portray that both leaderships are stable and in control amid Assad’s quest for normalisation and re-entry into the regional community of nations.

But it’s a facade. The template agreements for “strategic cooperation” and declaration of Iranian support for Assad via “sovereignty” cannot knit together a Syria that is fractured, perhaps for the long term. They cannot provide relief for Syrians facing inflation and shortages of food, fuel and utilities, let alone the 11 million — almost half of the pre-conflict population — who are refugees or internally displaced.

Nor can they sweep aside ten months of Iran’s nationwide protests, sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini after her detention and reporting beaten for “inappropriate attire”. They cannot end the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme or lift US and European sanctions. And despite Iran-backed attacks on American personnel in the region, they cannot break US support for the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria.

Seven weeks after the Assad-Raisi photo in Damascus, another international meeting in mid-June testified to the illusions of an Iran-Syria “Axis of Resistance”.

In Kazakhstan’s capital, the Assad regime was joining the six and a half-year “Astana process” – the UN-sponsored agreement between Iran, Russia, and Turkey to monitor its 2016 ceasefire for the first time in that part of Syria. This would be a sign of Damascus being actively involved in the supposed resolution of the March 2011 uprising.

But as soon as the session began, illusion met reality. The regime’s deputy foreign minister, Ayman Sousan, demanded Turkey withdraw its forces from opposition territory in northwest Syria. The Turks unsurprisingly refused. They wanted the gathering to put pressure on the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria, which Ankara sees as part of the Turkish Kurdish insurgency PKK.

But that raises the challenge of confronting the US, the backer of the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had helped evict the Islamic State from the country in 2019. Russia, embroiled in Vladimir Putin’s failing invasion of Ukraine, showed no appetite for a showdown with Washington.

So everyone went home with nothing beyond Moscow’s declaration: “This is a very crucial process.”

Moving pieces

The two days in Astana highlighted the difficulty for both the Assad regime and Iran. In a Middle East kaleidoscope of many moving pieces, it is daunting for either to line up all of them.

Assad’s headline ploy has been the restoration of relations with Arab states, hoping to break political isolation and his economic bind. There has been success: UAE and Bahrain reopening embassies; Assad’s visits to the Emirates and Oman; and re-entry into the Arab League in May, with Saudi Arabia — once the leading supporter of anti-Assad factions — welcoming Assad to the summit in Jeddah.

However, that process runs head-on into Assad’s reliance on Iran to maintain control over even part of Syria, given the longtime rivalry between Tehran and some Arab states — notably Saudi Arabia — throughout the region.

An Arabian pipedream?

The solution to the conundrum is a grand reconciliation, in which Iran would also repair its position in the region. In March, Iran and Saudi Arabia announced the resumption of diplomatic ties more than seven years after they were broken.

The China-brokered deal was accompanied by a high-level Iranian visit to the UAE. Tehran spoke loudly about the prospect of billions of dollars of Gulf investments in its battered economy.

The manoeuvres freed the Iranian leadership from an immediate crisis. Amid the nationwide protests, its currency had almost halved in value, sinking to 600,000:1 against the US dollar. The easing of tensions with the Arab states, as well as talk of an “interim deal” with the US over the nuclear programme, helped lift the rial to 500,000:1, relieving pressure on an official inflation rate of 50%, with increases for food about 75% per year.

But this is a tentative respite. Saudi Arabia and Iran remain on opposite sides in the Yemen civil war. They back different factions in Lebanon’s long-running political and economic turmoil. Gulf States are wary about the renewal of Iran-backed attacks on Iraqi bases which host US personnel, as well as any further moves by Tehran towards the capacity for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group has highlighted the unending instability in the Assad-held part of Syria. No Gulf country is likely to want to spend significant sums in support of his regime. Syria is far from their top priority, and it offers poor returns on investment. They cannot realistically hope to compete with the influence that Tehran has built through years of military engagement.

Western sanctions limit potential economic gains – and US sanctions in particular impose major legal barriers and political costs. Also, investing large amounts in Syria with a devastated infrastructure, an impoverished population with little purchasing power, a predatory regime and dismal security in the areas it nominally controls would be like pouring money into a bottomless pit.

Assad can still pose before the cameras to claim legitimacy. But his Iranian backers are entangled in domestic difficulties, his Russian backers are being sapped of strength by Putin’s deadly folly in Ukraine, and his would-be Arab escape route is far from assured.

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

( Middle East Monitor ) – As the death toll from the earthquakes which rocked Turkiye and Syria continues to rise, many are questioning whether sanctions on Syria are preventing aid from reaching the war-torn country.

After 12 years of civil war, most of Syria is once again under the control of the Assad regime, but a small enclave in the north is the last remaining territory held by Syrian opposition groups. Surrounded by Assad forces on three sides, the northern border with Turkiye was the only lifeline for the opposition-held territory to bring in aid and supplies.

In 2020, Bashar Al-Assad’s ally Russia used its veto power at the UN to force the closure of all crossings into Syria from Turkiye except the Bab Al-Hawa crossing. Moscow claimed the aid corridors into the opposition-held territory undermined the sovereignty of the Assad regime. The UN Security Council now also needed to vote every six months on whether to keep this one crossing open.

The closure of aid corridors resulted in a lack of essential items, building materials and specialist equipment making it impossible to rebuild the region which was devastated by war and bombed by Syrian and Russian forces.

However, damage from the 6 February 2023 earthquakes left the Bab Al-Hawa crossing impassable. For days Syria became impenetrable, but then two new crossings were opened with Al-Assad’s approval and aid began to trickle in once again.

The US, EU and UK placed sanctions on the Assad regime in 2011 and have tightened the noose around it since as a result of its systematic war crimes and human rights abuses over the course of the war.

The sanctions mostly blocked banking transactions, investments, flights and the import of oil, military equipment and technology. Many of these sanctions targeted individuals within the Syrian regime including President Bashar Al-Assad and his relatives.

Feeling the squeeze, the Assad regime has been benefitting from aid. A 2022 report has found ‘systemic’ corruption in humanitarian aid going into Syria through the United Nations with UN agencies giving procurement contracts to individuals with links to the Assad regime and tied to human rights violations.

Between 2019 and 2020 an estimated $63 million in UN funds was awarded to individuals sanctioned by the US and European states including close family members of President Bashar Al-Assad.

While aid has also started to enter northern Syria through the newly opened crossings, in the wake of the earthquakes, most are set to be administered by the Syrian regime. Damascus received aid from a number of countries including Iran, Iraq and Algeria, and is set to receive aid from the UN. The US has now also eased sanctions for six months to allow aid deliveries.

Trucks coming into northern Syria have mostly brought in food and tents but civil groups say they require specialist equipment to continue search and rescue efforts as well as construction materials to rebuild the homes that were destroyed in the tremors.

While the regime doesn’t patrol the crossing into northern Syria it can force its closure and stop aid being delivered to those in need. Syrians in the opposition-held territories – most of whom were displayed internally by Assad’s forces – find themselves once again at the mercy of their former leader.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

Jane Clinton and Harry Taylor at The Guardian report that 870,000 people are in desperate need of food.

Sanitation is a problem. In almost completely destroyed cities like Antakya, there are no remaining toilet facilities. Cholera outbreaks are a danger in such situations.

WHO has been able to send supplies to 400,000 people so far.

Some people whose cars were not destroyed are sleeping in them.

Tent cities are quickly being erected, but the lack of water is really worrisome. People can survive a lot, but if you don’t drink water for about three days, your kidneys give out and you die of renal failure.

Thousands of homeless Turks are already being accommodated in hotels and in government hostels. President Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkish universities would go to online teaching so that refugees from the earthquake could be put up in student dormitories.

Far more people were killed by the earthquake in Turkey than in Syria, with 3,500 dead in the latter. Over 5 million Syrians are without shelter now — according to the UN High Commission on Refugees. The Syrian government, though, is estimating about 300,000 homeless from the earthquake in government-held areas.

The Turkish figure for homelessness is not being reported but 13.5 million Turks were “affected” by the earthquake. The large number of Syrians affected came about because the country’s building stock was already badly damaged by the country’s civil war of c. 2012-2017. During 2015-2017 the Russian Air Force heavily bombed rebel-held areas such as East Aleppo and Idlib.

Some 6 million Syrians had been displaced inside the country by the war, before the earthquake. And tens of thousands of Syrians who have fled to Turkey from the war were struck by the earthquake. So this is misery on top of misery.

(The Conversation) – It didn’t take long for Syria’s Assad regime to seek political and economic benefit from the devastation of an earthquake. As emergency services were reaching victims of the 7.8-magnitude tremor on February 6, regime-linked organisations demanded governments “immediately end the siege and unilateral coercive economic sanctions imposed on Syria and its people for 12 years”.

Long-time supporters of the Assad line were just as prompt. Rania Khalek, a commentator on pro-Assad and Russian state-linked outlets, tweeted: “Syria has to deal with this horrific disaster while under US sanctions that have ruined its medical sector and capacity to respond, these sanctions are criminal.”

Meanwhile, the regime threatened to block any assistance to opposition-held areas of northwest Syria, with its UN ambassador, Bassam Sabbagh insisting that Damascus must oversee all deliveries into Syria.

The UN’s resident Syria coordinator, El-Mostafa Benlamlih, appealed: “Put politics aside and let us do our humanitarian work. We can’t afford to wait and negotiate. By the time we negotiate, it’s done, it’s finished.”

Assad’s sanctions manipulation

The sanctions over the regime’s deadly 12-year repression of its citizens date to April 29 2011, six weeks after authorities detained and abused teenage boys daubing graffiti in Daraa in southern Syria, sparking a popular uprising. Then US president, Barack Obama, ordered a block on the property of those involved in human rights violations.

The European Union and Canada followed in May, with travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and prohibition of the export of goods and technology that could be used by the regime’s armed forces. In August, Washington expanded sanctions to cover the oil sector and to prohibit any export of goods from the US to Syria.

The US blacklisted regime figures connected with Assad’s chemical weapons program after sarin and chlorine attacks that killed or wounded thousands of civilians. In 2019, Washington toughened the measures with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. Prompted by photographs of 6,785 detainees, most of them tortured to death in the regime’s prisons, the Act aimed at industries related to infrastructure, military maintenance, and energy production.

But the US, European, and international sanctions included exemptions for humanitarian aid. In November 2021, after reports from NGOs about obstacles to their operations, the US Treasury expanded its general license to “facilitate legitimate humanitarian activity while continuing to deny support to malicious actors”.

As the European Union extended its measures in May 2022, it reiterated that “the export of food, medicines or medical equipment are not subject to EU sanctions, and a number of specific exceptions are foreseen for humanitarian purposes”.

Aid has been delivered to Damascus throughout the uprising despite the ongoing repression, but much of it has wound up in the pockets of the Assad regime and its cronies. A review of 779 UN procurement entries for 2019-2020 found that, with manipulation of exchange rates, the regime diverted US$100 million (£83 million). Other funds were taken from NGOs operating in regime-controlled areas.

Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Legal Development Programme summarised that the Syria case showed how UN agencies were exposed “to significant reputational and actual risk of financing abusive actors and/or actors that operate in high-risk sectors without sufficient safeguards”.

Despite this, the European Union accepted the request of the regime for assistance under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. An initial €3.5 million (£3.1 million) was allocated for access to “shelter, water and sanitation, and health various items” as well as support of search-and-rescue operations.

Germany followed with the announcement of an additional €26 million in humanitarian assistance, and the UK with £3 million.

On Thursday, the US Treasury announced an extension of the licence for humanitarian aid “to make very clear that US sanctions in Syria will not stand in the way of lifesaving efforts for the Syrian people”.

Cutting off opposition areas

The most daunting barrier to international aid has long been erected around the opposition-controlled areas in northwest Syria. In 2014, the UN authorised four cross-border posts for aid operations, two from Turkey into northwest Syria and two from Iraq into the northeast.

By 2022, Russia’s veto in the UN security council had reduced the four posts to one, the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey into Idlib province. Had it not been for the politics around Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russians might have shut down that last post in January, cutting off 4 million people from any access to assistance.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the route from Turkey to Bab al-Hawa was badly damaged. Turkish authorities had to grant permission but were “completely overwhelmed with dealing and helping their own people”. The UN hesitated to use other crossings amid the past objections of the Assad regime and Russia.

As a result, the first movement of aid – six trucks with tents and hygiene products – only reached northwest Syria on Thursday morning, more than 72 hours after the earthquake.

With rescuers relying on old cranes, pickaxes, and shovels, the head of the White Helmets civil defence organisation, Raed al-Saleh, said: “The UN are not delivering the aid that we are in most need of to help us save lives, with time running out.”

Political economist Karam Shaar of the Middle East Institute summarised on Twitter: “The groaning of the thousands trapped under the rubble has ceased over the past few hours. Why didn’t the UN drop aid? Because they need permission from Damascus: the same Damascus that has been bombing them day and night.”

Meanwhile, as the death toll climbs in both Assad and opposition-controlled areas of Syria, the political drumbeat from Damascus goes on. The regime’s foreign minister, Feisal Mikdad, meeting a senior UN official on Thursday, proclaimed without any apparent irony: “The western politicisation of the humanitarian assistance is unacceptable.”

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Syrian conflict has been marked by prolonged arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and forced disappearance at the hands of all parties to the conflict. UN Secretary-General António Guterres proposed the mechanism in a landmark report published in August 2022 on how to bolster efforts to address the thousands of detained and disappeared and provide support to their families.

“The practice of “disappearing” people in Syria has left a devastating legacy for hundreds of thousands of people and their loves ones,” said Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “A new international entity to address this devastating unfinished business that can never be overlooked from the Syrian conflict offers a glimmer of hope for families.”

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been responsible for the vast majority of those disappearances, which frequently result in deaths in custody and extrajudicial executions. Even before the crisis began in 2011, Syrian authorities forcibly disappeared people for peaceful political opposition, critical reporting, and human rights activism. Non-state armed groups have also abducted people, with some like ISIS taking hostages and summarily killing them.

As of August, the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated that around 111,000 people remain unaccounted for, most believed to have been in the hands of the Syrian government. The exact number cannot be determined because the overwhelming majority of detention facilities, especially those run by the intelligence forces, are off-limits to outsiders. Those detained by government security services or many of the non-state armed groups in Syria are routinely subjected to enforced disappearance or held incommunicado, with families unable to get information about the whereabouts of their loved ones or what happened to them.

Groups representing families of people formerly detained, as well as Syrian civil society and international human rights organizations, have tirelessly advocated on behalf of torture victims and the thousands who have been disappeared, arbitrarily detained, and kidnapped, calling for a robust independent body to investigate thousands of disappearances. Most recently, 10 Syrian victims’ associations laid out their views on what such a body should look like.

Consistent with the views of the Syrian victims’ associations, the secretary-general’s August report acknowledged the systemic challenges families across Syria face when seeking information about their missing loved ones and highlighted the gaps in current efforts. The secretary general also set out the proposed mandate and priorities of a new body for this purpose, including providing adequate support to victims, survivors, and their families. Such a body would offer a single avenue to register new cases, as well as coordinate with other existing mechanisms, to build upon the wealth of available information and streamline efforts to tackle this issue.

“Eleven years into the conflict and the Syrian government and armed opposition groups continue to disappear or abduct anyone who opposes them, while their allies, Russia and Turkey, do nothing to stop these violations,” said Diana Semaan, Amnesty International’s acting deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa. “As tens of thousands languish in detention facilities or elsewhere, there are no reliable avenues for families to learn the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones. The lack of political will to address this issue has only prolonged the suffering of families. The UN SG’s proposal provides a way to fulfill the families’ right to truth and member states should rally behind it.”

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria has thrown its weight behind the secretary-general’s proposal, with the commissioners announcing in an opinion piece for Al Jazeera English that the considerable wealth of information the Commission had collected over 11 years will be made available to the new mechanism. The commissioners also warned that the longer it takes to establish such a mechanism, the more difficult it will be to clarify the whereabouts and fate of the missing and those forcibly disappeared. “Families have waited far too long for action at the international level,” the commissioners said. “The time to act is now.”

Member states should do everything in their power to ensure that a new international body in line with the secretary-general’s recommendations is established quickly through General Assembly action. Countries with influence in Syria should also put pressure on parties to the conflict to act swiftly to resolve what has come to be seen as one of the major tragedies of the Syrian conflict, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said.

Russia and Iran, the most prominent backers of the Syrian government, should press the government to immediately publish the names of everyone who died in Syrian detention facilities, inform families of the deceased, and return the bodies to their relatives. They should also press the government to provide information on the whereabouts of and what happened to all those forcibly disappeared, end the practice of enforced disappearance, and allow independent humanitarian agencies access to detention facilities.

Backers of non-state armed groups, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, should compel groups they support to reveal what happened to the detainees in their custody and allow humanitarian agencies access to their detention facilities.

Via Human Rights Watch

The US military justifies its continued presence in Syria by saying it is to ensure that the so-called Islamic State group (ISIL) cannot stage a resurgence. If that had been the main purpose, however, then the US would not have greenlit a Turkish invasion of the northern, Kurdish areas of Turkey, which disrupted the very people who had partnered with the US most effectively to defeat ISIL.

Some analysts have suggested that the US military presence is intended to block Iranian overland shipment of weapons to Shiite militias. Moreover, critics of US policy, including China’s CGTN news network, say the goal is to ensure that the oil produced at rigs in Deir al-Zor goes to the Kurdish allies of the US rather than to he central government of President Bashar al-Assad, head of the ruling Baath Party. At one point in the Trump administration there was even an attempt to have Deir al-Zor’s oil exported by an American corporation, which, since it interferes in a stark way with Syrian national sovereignty, would have certainly been a crime, and perhaps a war crime.

I don’t think it could be argued effectively at an international forum or court that the US mainland is threatened from eastern Syria any more. Since self-defense is the only slim reed of legitimacy enjoyed by the US military presence in Syria, if that is stripped away then all you are left with is a war crime. The Syrian government has repeatedly asked the US to vacate its territory. So one could make the argument that the US military presence is a form of occupation (that is what the pro-Shiite newspapers call it) that is illegitimate and illegal.

Be that as it may, the continued presence in Syria of 900 US troops is certainly unwise and a potential source of instability. The US is sharing military space with Russia, which nowadays could spiral into war because the US is already shipping billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine to help it kill Russian troops who invaded the Donbass region of that country.

Russia provided air power to the al-Assad government in helping it take back control over most of the country from September, 2015. Al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army, however, did not have enough troops on the ground to take back large amounts of territory. It therefore depended on Shiite militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, who were mobilized in Syria by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Shiite militias were all along anti-American, but that hostility escalated on January 2, 2020, when Trump assassinated both Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Brigade special operations unit and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of the Brigdes of the Party of God, an Iraqi Shiite militia.

The Brigades have ever since harassed the US military in Iraq and Syria whenever they could. Although the US did not announce the identity of the Shiite militia it bombed, it was likely the Brigades of the Party of God.

Some observers believe that the Brigades were permitted to attempt to drone the US troops in Tanf by the Russian military.

The US and Russia are on a war footing in Ukraine, and the days when they could hope to cohabit as imperial powers in Syria may have come to a close. Russia is still engaged against Muslim fundamentalist rebels holed up in the northern Idlib Province,, and Moscow blames the US CIA for having trained some of these groups, against which Russia still launches air strikes.

I can’t see a vital US interest in continuing to keep 900 US troops in Syria, when the civil war there has wound down and given the dangers of a US-Russian confrontation in that country.

The Syrian government has never acknowledged detaining Tice, and senior officials have reportedly denied having information about his whereabouts. If he was detained by Syrian government forces, their allies, or other parties to the conflict, it would likely amount to an “enforced disappearance”, a crime under international law. According to his family, since Tice’s capture the only information released by his captors has been a 43-second video showing him being held by unidentified armed men.

Tice’s family deserve answers, and so do the families of tens of thousands of others who have been kidnapped, arbitrarily detained, and forcibly disappeared by the Syrian government, armed anti-government groups, and extremist armed groups like the Islamic State (ISIS). Syrian authorities’ systematic use of enforced disappearances frequently result in torture and death.

Groups representing families of victims and survivors of detention, as well as Syrian civil society and international human rights organizations, have tirelessly advocated on behalf of torture victims and the thousands who have been disappeared, arbitrarily detained, and kidnapped, calling for a robust independent body to investigate thousands of cases of disappearances. Most recently, ten Syrian victims’ associations laid out their views on what such a body tasked with confronting the crisis of detention and enforced disappearance in Syria could look like.

Yet despite the staggering evidence of violations and the devastating impact these practices have had, little progress has been made to end these practices and hold perpetrators accountable. Instead, government forces and anti-government armed groups continue to arbitrarily arrest and abduct individuals, while families ask questions but get no answers.

While fighting in many parts of Syria has subsided, the practice of “disappearing” people has left a devastating legacy that impacts tens of thousands: the disappeared themselves, their families, and their loved ones. Until there are answers to what happened, and people are held accountable for these crimes, peace and stability in Syria will continue to be illusive.