International Community Should Help Syria to Hold De-escalation Zones

Rasa - With the help of Iran, Russia and Turkey, a series of de-escalation zones in Syria have gone into effect, with an aim of separating warring factions around the country.

News ID: 429549

Date: 09 May 2017 - 23:46

RNA - The details of how this is all going to work isn’t clear. It is working though, and that’s a significant detail, with fighting dropping significantly nationwide. Fighting, of course, hasn’t stopped entirely. The allied forces of Iran, Russia and Syria will continue to target the positions of ISIL and Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups which are excluded from the agreement.

Russian officials say the specifics of how the deescalation zones will be enforced are still far from finalized, and that it might well be at least as long as another month before everything is sorted out. In the meantime, the main thing that’s holding it together at all is the idea that it might work, after so many years of war. Of course, a lot can go wrong with the deal, particularly right now while the United States says it has no intention to respect the agreement. That nothing has gone wrong yet may be a coincidence, but it might also be a sign of cooler heads prevailing for ending a foreign-backed conflict that offers no benefits to the Syrian people and the larger international community.

This action by Washington to dismiss the deescalation zones, however, is what ISIL wants and what the regime changers want. It is not what the people of Syria or the world want. It shreds the rule of law by declaring war on a sovereign nation through terror and occupation - a nation that wants peace with itself and with the rest of the international community.

Those who would like to continue to fight terrorism cannot fight terrorism in Syria without coordinated actions with the government and without a broader international coalition. Given that the full-scale US-led invasion and occupation for several years from 2003 onwards struggled to pacify Iraq, airstrikes alone are not likely to succeed in Syria. US airstrikes result in civilian casualties as ISIL forces hide among the civilian population. This is conceivably their aim to provoke the West into military action, which hurts Muslim civilians, thus supporting their narrative of the West’s war on Islam.

The world casts doubt on the view that ISIL targets could be bombed in residential areas where civilians live, and that the deescalation zones agreement is not the legitimate and practical path to peace. Further US airstrikes cannot be justified legally without a request for assistance from the Syrian government, and it is unlikely that the “Assad must go” gang could be seen to be responding to such a request.

Any US action to violate the deescalation zones agreement has to comply with international law, and the most likely way to achieve this would be to claim that military action is for humanitarian purposes, using the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. This remains elusive without a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorize it.

US bombing in Syria is an order of magnitude more difficult than airstrikes in Iraq for all sorts of reasons – military, legal and technical. Many governments and international bodies support bombing ISIL positions but they are unsure about the real motive behind the United States and its regional allies.

The violence against Syria constitutes a laundry list of war crimes. The US and its allies have employed double standards with regard to human rights and war crimes, applying or ignoring these principles as is convenient to their geopolitical agenda. They claim they are genuinely seeking to fight terrorism and maintain regional stability, but in reality they use these principles to gain leverage in the ongoing push to regime change Syria.

There is even a big danger here that the new US strikes in post-ceasefire Syria are going to resemble the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in the sense that there is no accountability for who is killed. There has to be some international accountability for what happens if the country doesn’t want war and there are still reports of civilian casualties caused by US airstrikes.

In a nutshell, the US hands in this dirty war extend beyond direct bombings. Their push for regime change in Damascus is left unchecked: Training and funding and equipping “moderate” terrorist groups. Likewise, many of the US-led coalition members continue to give ISIL military assistance and training and equipment. They are helping the terrorist group commit war crimes against humanity and they haven’t been held to account yet. This should be more than enough to convince the international community to do whatever it can to help Syria and its allies to hold the deescalation zones.

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