“Siege, starve, and surrender”: inside the next phase of the Syrian civil war

Airstrikes. Artillery fire. Cluster and barrel bombs.

This is what the nearly 400,000 people in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital of Damascus, have faced over the past two weeks. Syrian forces have dramatically escalated their attacks on the area, which is mostly controlled by rebel forces who for five years have opposed President Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Human rights observers say thousands are injured and more than 500 people — including around 120 children — have died during the uptick in fighting, marking this as one of the bloodiest stretches of the eight-year Syrian civil war.

The offensive highlights a grim reality about the current state of the war: Assad is winning and has now turned his attention to retaking parts of the country he lost. Recapturing Eastern Ghouta — an area that lies only 6 miles away from Damascus — is an important part of his push to force the rebels holding the area to surrender once and for all.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

The fighting seems certain to intensify. Last Saturday, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for a 30-day ceasefire in Syria. Two days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin — whose forces back the Assad regime and are the main reason the Syrian ruler is winning the conflict — requested a daily five-hour “humanitarian pause” in the fighting so civilians in Eastern Ghouta could escape the targeted area.

Syrian planes have continued bombing, however. The US has harshly condemned the onslaught — “The regime claims it is fighting terrorists, but is instead terrorizing hundreds of thousands of civilians,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert tweeted on Monday — but Syrian leaders say the fighting will continue.

“We practice a sovereign right of self-defense,” Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s UN ambassador, said after the ceasefire vote on Saturday.

More than anything, the attacks show how Eastern Ghouta is the next battlefield in one of the world’s worst civil wars — and just how stunningly bloody the fight will be. “The Syrian people are just going to suffer as this continues to be a huge humanitarian disaster,” Mara Karlin, who spent years on Middle East security issues at the Pentagon, told me.

“Siege, starve, surrender”

Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria expert at the Institute for the Study of War, says that Assad is trying to “recapture every square inch of Syrian territory.” He’s done so by leading a brutal campaign across the country — one that Eastern Ghouta now faces.

“The regime has been leading a ‘siege, starve, and surrender’ campaign for years,” she said in an interview.

In practice, that means the Assad government purposely overwhelms opposition-held areas with attacks to make life for the civilian population unlivable. Assad’s forces destroy hospitals, schools, markets, and even mosques, so it’s nearly impossible for noncombatants to eat regular meals, receive medical attention, or pray where they want.

Assad followed this playbook most notably in the city of Aleppo. With Russian and Iranian help, Assad retook control of the city in December 2016 after months of brutal fighting. The tide turned in the regime’s favor after it imposed a blockade around the city, once one of Syria’s biggest and most vibrant, which cut off food and medical supplies to some 320,000 people. Assad also launched a campaign to systematically destroy the medical facilities in rebel-held parts of the city, killing or wounding many of its remaining doctors and nurses.

Assad continues to use this strategy today because it works: Rebels who don’t have food or medical provisions quickly lose the will or the ability to fight, and civilians in besieged areas often start cooperating with the government just to make it stop. There’s no reason to think Assad will change course in Eastern Ghouta.

“Clearly, the government made a judgment that they wanted to stay in power all costs,” Shanna Kirschner, a Syria expert at Allegheny College, told me. “Once you go down that road, it’s very unlikely a government reverses that decision.”

Assad can now focus on Eastern Ghouta

It’s worth reiterating that the regime has tried for years to bring Eastern Ghouta back under its fold — and has allegedly committed war crimes to do so.

On August 21, 2013, for example, regime forces launched a chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta, killing hundreds of men, women, and children. At the time, it was one of the biggest and most horrific attacks in the civil war. Since then, Assad has slowly, and under the radar, continued to lay siege to the area.

But he hasn’t been able to overtake Eastern Ghouta yet because he’s short on troops, Cafarella told me. Many of Assad’s forces have died during years of fighting, she continued, which is why the regime hasn’t yet mustered the ground troops needed to force Eastern Ghouta’s myriad rebel groups to surrender.

Circumstances have since changed. “Now Assad has the luxury of getting to focus more on various rebel groups,” Karlin, who’s now at Johns Hopkins University, told me, because “ISIS is now less of a military problem for the regime.” Recall that in 2015, ISIS took and governed much of northern and eastern Syria. But two years later, the US-led anti-ISIS coalition effectively defeated the terrorist group’s so-called caliphate in Syria (and Iraq).

ISIS’s physical demise gave pro-regime forces the time and space to focus on Eastern Ghouta — and they’ve been explicitly threatening the area’s civilian population ever since.

“I promise I will teach them a lesson, in combat and in fire,” Gen. Suheil al-Hassan, commander of the elite, Assad-backed Tiger Forces, said in a February 19 video. “You won’t find a rescuer. And if you do, you will be rescued with water like boiling oil. You’ll be rescued with blood.”

It’s hard to know the true extent of the devastation since the fighting started because the conditions make it hard to report there, but the early indications suggest it’s significant, and getting worse.

For example, Syrian warplanes have targeted dozens of hospitals, leading Doctors Without Borders to grimly state on Saturday that the region’s ability to provide health care is “in its final throes.” Some aid convoys can’t even enter the area to provide assistance because of the danger.

Anti-Assad activists also claimed the regime has used chemical weapons, primarily chlorine gas, in recent attacks that on Sunday killed a child. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, immediately opened an investigation into the attack.

But the Syrian American Medical Society claimed in a February 25 tweet that some of its patients are “suffering from symptoms indicative to exposure to chemical compounds.”

That, in part, is why international leaders are calling for the bloodshed to end. “Eastern Ghouta cannot wait, it is high time to stop this hell on earth,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Sunday.

The problem is it’s not clear that the hellish conditions will ease anytime soon.

This is only likely to get worse

Last weekend showed why diplomacy has failed to even make a dent in Syria’s carnage.

It took three days for the United Nations to approve a resolution for a month-long ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta due to Russian objections. Moscow’s representative initially vetoed the resolution on February 22, saying that reports of widespread civilian casualties were nothing more than “mass psychosis.” Instead, Russia proposed amendments that would allow it and Syrian forces to continue targeting anti-Assad groups.

But the UN Security Council resolution passed relatively unchanged on February 25. It “demands that all parties cease hostilities without delay” and allows for the provision of emergency aid and evacuations of the wounded.

It seems the resolution is nothing more than words at this point. Mere hours after the vote, Syrian warplanes resumed bombing Eastern Ghouta, according to human rights groups, even though some on the ground say the resolution slightly improved conditions. “Shelling is calmer than before, it’s true, but there is still shelling,” Mohammad Adel, a young man in the area, told the New York Times on Tuesday.

Some experts I spoke to raised the possibility of America carrying out a limited strike on Syria to punish Assad for the attacks. The US did something similar in April 2017, launching 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria in response to Assad’s chemical weapons attack that killed around 85 people.

Seeing photos of dead children could compel President Donald Trump to choose to strike now, experts noted. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley recalled those images after the UN resolution vote as a way to criticize Syria and Russia for their actions. “How many mothers lost their kids to the bombing and shelling?” she said. “How many more images did we need to see of fathers holding their dead children?

There’s currently no public indication that Trump is considering the use of force. The White House and Pentagon didn’t respond to my questions about potential strikes against Syrian targets. And it’s not clear what other options, if any, are on the table to help stop the bloodshed.

“There’s really no will for any robust measures to stop the fighting,” Kirschner told me. “The future is very bleak for Syria.”