10 years on, the birds of prey circle over Syria

It all started with protests on March 15, 2011 triggered by a graffiti on a school wall in the southern province of Deraa, which read: "It's your turn now, doctor!" It was written by some students who were clearly not happy with the state of affairs under the leadership of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The doctor in the graffiti referred to the president, who had served as a doctor in the Syrian Army. His specialisation was ophthalmology.

The graffiti was a manifestation of the elephant in the room, and the common people started to rise up to voice their dissatisfaction. Set against the backdrop of the newly-lit flames of the Arab Spring, the protests soon gained momentum and spread like wildfire from one province to another, and eventually throughout the country.

The crackdown on protesters by the Assad regime had been swift and brutal, and soon the protests turned into a civil war, with the people fighting for or against the government. The Syrian political landscape—already rife with factional divisions among the Kurds, the Salafi jihadists, the Sunni groups, and other factions trying to leverage the people's anti-government sentiment to serve their vested interests—splintered into many rebel groups. This is where Syria fell apart.

Foreign powers, regional and global, soon joined in the mad dash for geopolitical power, siding with one party or another. The US, Russia, France, the UK, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, along with other countries, got involved in the war in some way or another. While Iran backed the Hezbollah fighters in support of the Assad regime, Qatar and Saudi Arabia facilitated the rise of various predominantly Sunni militant factions. Turkey's tussle with Syrian Democratic Forces—engaged in the fight against terrorist groups, specifically the ISIS—across the northeastern border of Syria played a role in strengthening the base of the terrorist group.

The swift emergence of militant outfits in the war-torn country, facilitated by the power vacuum in leadership, turned Syria into a lucrative spot for foreign intervention. Under the pretext of fighting international terrorism, many western powers including the US intervened with military measures, all vying for greater control in this resource-rich region. And of course, many of these countries engaged in profitable arms trade thanks to the perpetual state of war in the country. 

The result: 387,118 casualties till December 2020, more than one-third of them civilians (116,911 civilians, to be more precise). This data was published by the UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

In addition, around 205,300 people remain traceless—either dead or just missing—including more than 88,000 civilians who are "believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons", as reported by the BBC.

But the worst sufferers have perhaps been the children. "Almost 12,000 children were killed or injured in the past decade, according to verified data—an average of more than three children a day," reported the Unicef on March 10 this year.

Unfortunately, in the last 10 years, children were not only killed in Syria, but also recruited to fight in the war. According to Unicef data, more than 5,700 children have fallen victim to the bloodthirsty predators. Some of the recruits were as young as seven. And no one knows how many have died in the line of fire.

Thousands of children have been separated from their families or just orphaned with nowhere to go or turn for support. What of those children born of the fighters? Hundreds and thousands of them are living miserable lives in the various camps across Syria. Case in point: camps across northeast Syria, including the infamous Al-Hol camp, which house around "27,500 children of at least 60 nationalities and thousands of Syrian children associated with armed groups," as reported by Unicef.

The Unicef report further added that more than half a million Syrian children under the age of five suffer from stunting due to chronic malnutrition. The prices of food went up by 230 percent in 2020 alone. The Syrian economy has crumbled under the pressure of the war.

Al Jazeera cited a UN report saying that more than 80 percent of the Syrian population is now living below the poverty line. The Syrian pound has plummeted to 4,000 against one US dollar in the black market. The economic cost of the war over the last decade has been north of USD 1.2 trillion, according to World Vision.

"Even if the war ended today, its cost will continue to accumulate to the tune of an additional USD 1.7 trillion in today's money through to 2035", the World Vision report added.   

Yet, those who have been lucky to survive amidst the massacre and the mayhem live on the charity of donors, at times the same ones who had sold arms at lucrative prices to fuel the war. And many have been forced to flee, often multiple times, to survive the carnage of the warring parties.

In the last decade, more than 12.3 million people have been displaced. While 5.6 million Syrians have been registered as refugees outside the country, around 6.7 million have been internally displaced. The total number of displaced is more than half of the pre-war Syrian population of around 22 million.

While efforts have been made, especially in recent years, to diffuse tensions in Syria, many of the refugees do not ever want to return to Syria. They just want peace and a life as normal as it can get.

And with the Assad regime still wielding strong political power and control over the majority of the land, one can only wonder why the refugees are unwilling to return to their motherland. Assad's ruthlessness in dealing with dissent is known to the world—156,329 of all the casualties are attributed to the Syrian government—and fear of repercussions remains high among the anti-establishment population.

The protests in Syria, along with the spirit of change that sparked those protests in the first place, have died down, and the country has been crushed by the decade-long conflict. The country has gained nothing in the last 10 years; if anything, it has lost its people, its resources, its infrastructure, its control over itself.

One of the main reasons why this has happened is the inability of the various factions to unite for one single cause: democracy and change. Except for the common people, who had solely taken to the streets imbued with the inspiration of the Araba Spring, all the actors in the Syrian war had been only interested in serving their individual political gains, and it is this failure of the actors to unite behind one cause that has been self-defeating for the common Syrians.

In fact, most of the actors had not been fighting for democracy; they just capitalised on the pro-democracy movement of the people to push for their own control over the land. And this is where the movement died and turned into a bloody mess.  

Ten years on, Syria is a country nearly destroyed. Ten years on, efforts to rebuild the nation are meagre. The involvement of the foreign powers—especially those that had been fuelling this crisis—in these rebuilding measures has little visibility. And one only wonders how long it would take for the country to come out of the mess that the political ambitions of the warring parties has created. 

With the birds of prey pecking on the carcass of a defeated nation, the future for the Syrians looks grim, if there is a future at all.

Tasneem Tayeb is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her Twitter handle is: @TayebTasneem