John J. Metzler

UNITED NATIONS — The situation in Syria has descended into a new level of Hell, as the civil war continues, refugees fleeing the country increase, and the fractured rebel groups have begun to turn on each other as much as fight the Assad family regime.

The Security Council remains politically deadlocked and thus neutralized, while the UN relief agencies carry out outstanding humanitarian efforts despite the fighting and the searing summer temperatures.

The frenzied carnage of over 95,000 people killed in over two years of conflict have seen Syria’s slow but deliberate descent into the Inferno.

Now hovering over the chaos and destruction of this Mideast state, is the specter of an hard-line Islamist regime which may rise from the ashes.

In the meantime refugees pour out of Syria and are internally displaced at an alarming rate. Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warns that such refugee numbers has not risen “at such a frightening rate” since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He stressed that the Syrian conflict has triggered the world’s worst refugee crisis for twenty years, with an average of 6,000 people fleeing every day in 2013.

The UN’s humanitarian aid chief Valerie Amos states that at least 6.8 million Syrians need urgent assistance. Neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have taken the brunt of the humanitarian spillover.

There are few angels in the Syrian civil war. Contrary to the romanticized media template of a Mideast morality play between a cruel dictator (Assad is) and virtuous freedom fighters (probably the minority), the truth becomes increasingly blurred in the mirage of complicated ethnic politics, historic religious faultlines, and what has tragically become a showdown between the USA, France and Russia, and Iran.

Syria has been an authoritarian but secular state under the Assad family since the 1960’s; the regime has long been a Soviet ally (now Russian), part of the rejectionist front against any peace deal with Israel, and a predatory power/occupier towards neighboring Lebanon. This is not a nice guy regime, nor I argue, an aspiring democracy.

Given the fractious Islamic divide of Sunni and Alawite factions, the Christians, the Druze and the Kurds, such deep ethnic and religious fissures running throughout this historic land, could see Syria descend into a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, militia fiefdoms, and terrorist havens.

The Obama Administration’s muddled Mideast policies have brought little strategic focus, more unanswered questions, and hopeless political illusions. While Washington is certainly correct not to engage militarily with boots on the ground in this imbroglio, Obama nonetheless has given assurances of American weapons to the rebel factions; the good guys, we assume, presume and hope.

Though the French have been more politically and clandestinely militarily engaged in their former Levantine colony, this does not make Syria’s fight an American cause nor national interest, as I have long opined. Syria while an ancient land did not have its current national borders until the mid 1930’s when France formally created the country.
The outcome of Syria’s conflict remains a clear cut Russian interest, (and Putin’s political burden), profoundly in Turkey’s national interest for opposite reasons, and most dangerously in Hizbullah’s interest (supporting Assad) and Al Qaida’s (trying to dominate the rebels).

Samantha Power, the Obama administration’s nominee as new American Ambassador to the UN told a Senate hearing that the UN’s failure to halt mass carnage in Syria is a “disgrace that history will judge harshly.” What Ms. Power overlooks is that the deadlock in the Security Council is not the fault of the UN per se but of a political impasse between the U.S., Britain and France versus Russia, and to some degree China.

The sad point is there will be no winners now. The country has irreparable physical damage and psychological trauma. There’s plenty of blame to go around. It’s time for Syrians of all political factions to go to the negotiating table lest the country disintegrate, fragment and descend even deeper into the sectarian abyss. Syria is hemorrhaging, its people are dying, and the world is losing interest.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com.

  Bashar Assad, Samantha Power, Sunni and Alawite factions, Syria descends into the Inferno as the world begins to lose interest, UN High Commissioner for Refugees