The truth about what is happening in Syria is complicated, full of contradictions and hard to know. The truth about what we should do or not do concerning Syria is simple, after we shed our biases.
Almost everybody I know, here and in the Middle East, has an opinion, often irrelevant. I too, because of my experiences in Lebanon, have cumbersome baggage which I must put aside to write this article.
The imminent crisis in Syria at the moment is the battle for Aleppo, the second largest city in the country, the only city in Syria with a majority population of Christians. The shells fall. Wherever they fall, whoever fired them, we get pictures on television of bloody children. It is a fact of modern warfare that no matter who bombs and shells and shoots, civilians die, especially in a battle over control of a city.
On the Ground in Aleppo
After noticing serious discrepancies in news reports from varied sources, especially about who is responsible for this destruction of human life, I decided to use my personal contacts and go to those who are the closest to the conflict and have the biggest stake in its outcome.
So what I am going to tell you has been backed up by Syrian Christians onsite in Aleppo and people in personal contact with others in the city.
According to them, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russia, Iran and Hizballah, has regained 65% of the Syrian territory which was occupied by ISIS and is now assaulting the rest, primarily Eastern Aleppo.
Meanwhile, from Eastern Aleppo ISIS and other rebel groups send various kinds of bombs into Western Aleppo while virtually holding hostage a civilian population of more than 200,000 people, ready to shoot them if they try to escape. Reports in American media that these attacks are coming from Syrian and Russian weapons are not true, according to Vanessa Beely an independent reporter who recently returned from Aleppo. She even reveals that ISIS has gun positions on the roofs of three hospitals in the East and bombards the western sector from these positions. It was first of all the discrepancy between her reports and others aired on major networks that drove me to make phone calls and send emails to learn what Syrian Christians say.
I have the word of a medical doctor who lives in Western Aleppo that Assad and his partners are trying to rescue the Christians who are threatened with massacre by ISIS, and they, plus many Muslims, stand solidly on his side.
Beely points out that Syrians of all faiths are living together in places like Tartus and Latakia under control of the Assad regime. In this area and in Western Aleppo, according to this eyewitness, the people say that all of the rebel groups are terrorists and criminals, committing atrocities against the people, while Assad and his allies are making progress against them.
From My Own Experience
What I know without consulting anyone is that under the Assad government the Christians of Syria have been safe and free. As a publisher in Lebanon I could send Christian literature into Syria. The churches were growing. I could myself visit Syria and go to church on Sunday morning. For sure there were things one could not do. It was illegal to hand out Christian literature on the street, and you had better not get caught baptizing somebody in your bathtub. But I knew a Syrian Muslim who converted to the Christian faith and successfully changed his religion on his identity card.
The Obama administration has, very wisely in my opinion, been cautious about participation in this war. There are too many rebel groups and some are unpredictable. What may have started as an honest democratic movement has disintegrated into a multiplicity of militias and motives. Truthfully another country’s civil war always involves things we don’t understand, and other people’s streets are full of unsuspected traps for foreigners. At the same time Obama has taken the position that the Assad regime has to go.
What Everybody Knows
Now however it is general knowledge here and in the Middle East that our government is studying four options for intervention. The appealing reason for intervening is to save the lives of helpless civilians, those stunned children dragged from the rubble. All of Washington’s options will also cost lives and traumatized children. All of the options are actually ways of interrupting what the Syrian Army and its allies are doing. That’s the point. One of the proposals is bombing the Syrian Army.
Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, in a recent article on HuffPost points out that the Obama Administration cannot bomb Syrian government forces without the approval of Congress, because that would be an act of war against another country. Not only is Naiman right about this, but bombing the Syrian government will be an attack on the last hope of the Christian population and, besides that, a foolish risk, unless we would really like to start World War III.
Another of my contacts, a Syrian Christian who lives in Lebanon but travels to Syria frequently and visited two weeks ago with residents of Western Aleppo, observes that the U.S. was largely silent while churches were destroyed, bishops were kidnapped, hundreds of thousands of people were killed or injured, and millions became wandering refugees but is now considering stepping into the conflict. He concludes, as I do, that it is because our own interests are threatened. Our dominance of the region, our status in the world is shaken. In other words, our biases now cloud our judgment. It happens that the U.S. government dislikes every military group that is marching on Aleppo. We don’t want any of them, Syria or Iran or Russia or Hizballah, to win.
My Personal Animosities
Bias I understand. As one who lived through years of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, I have my own resentments against Assad and his Army. The destruction of the American Marines, which was blamed finally on Iran, was tragic and traumatic for me (as described in my book), and there was evidence that Iran was behind the kidnapping of Americans, which caused the U.S. State Department to force our mission out of Lebanon. Furthermore, I am always sympathetic with the Lebanese Christians and swayed by their concerns, one of which is the power of Hizballah which has upset the political balance of Lebanon. But none of these is an excuse to be silent about what is happening in Syria and the gross error that is being considered.
With my biases put aside, I see clearly that for America to attack the Syrian Army—partially motivated by our distrust of Iran or our dislike for Hizballah or some rivalry with Russia—would be to fight our own wars on Syrian soil, which is immoral to say the least. To hinder anyone from liberating the Christians of Syria and the population of Aleppo will mean fighting on the side of ISIS and be a wicked use of our power and a mistake that will leave us with few friends in the Middle East.