Burning Country by Yassin-Kassab Robin; Al-Shami Leila;

Author:Yassin-Kassab, Robin; Al-Shami, Leila;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

7

Dispossession and Exile

All the Syrian people are living a nightmare, they can’t escape it. They had lives before and now they don’t.

Maher, a Syrian refugee in Europe1

What does exile mean? No studies, no work, no return.

Ziad Homsi2

As the regime attempted to bomb, torture and starve the people into submission, a humanitarian crisis bloomed like a poisonous flower. By February 2015 more than 220,000 had lost their lives, and four times that number had been wounded.3 In other words, at least 6 per cent of the Syrian population had been killed or injured since 2011.4

More than 150,000 have been incarcerated in Assad’s dungeons. Many of them will never come out. In January 2014, ‘Caesar’, a defected military police photographer who recorded deaths in regime custody over a two-year period, released thousands of photos to human rights investigators. These provide evidence of the murder of 11,000 detainees, tortured or starved to death. The number accounts for those killed in only one region of the country.5 One of the torture camps photographed was geo-located as being only 500 metres from the Presidential Palace in Damascus.6

War profiteers and criminal gangs proliferated as society stalled; kidnapping and extortion became rife. This drove the wealthy out – those who hadn’t done so already fled the bombs. And when civil revolutionaries became targets of extremist jihadist militias as well as Assad, thousands more fled the once-liberated areas. Sectarian and revenge killings became increasingly common.

With the collapse of the economy and destruction of infrastructure, three million lost their jobs, pushing unemployment to 57.7 per cent.7 Four in every five Syrians were now living in poverty, and extreme poverty rose to 64.7 per cent.8 Conditions were so desperate that 12.2 million people needed humanitarian assistance to survive, 4.8 million of them in areas that were difficult for humanitarian actors to reach.9 More than 640,200 were besieged, facing starvation and illness, as the regime withheld food and water as a weapon of war, part of its ‘surrender or starve’ policy.10 Qusai Zakarya describes the ‘filthy truce offer’ the regime offered the civilians of his neighbourhood:

Assad has been starving the besieged people of Moadamiya for over a year, trying to make us desperate enough to resort to any means to feed our families and children. And so our local council has now approved an agreement to raise the regime flag high in our town, as a first step in a bigger deal. In return, the regime promises to deliver daily meals to the town. This tactic will keep incoming food under regime control. We will continue to be under their mercy for every meal on a daily basis.11

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