Subscribe
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria, as per news agency Reuters. Two officers of the Syrian Army said the Baathist leader had boarded a plane and left for an unknown destination.
A-Assad’s departure could very well bring an end to the 13-year-old brutal conflict in the West Asian nation, although there are doubts regarding this too. Al-Assad is backed by Russia and Iran and the two powers could very well try to take chances again.
For the moment though, the Syrian Civil War that began as an uprising against al-Assad in March 2011, is at an end. And the casualties are horrifying.
“Since the start of the conflict at least 580,000 people have been killed, including an estimated 306,887 civilians from 1 March 2011 to 31 March 2021, according to the most recent figures from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Nearly 13 million people have been displaced, including 6.7 million refugees,” research and advocacy organisation, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) said in a note on its website on December 1, 2024.
The Syrian Civil War has its roots in the widespread protests against al-Assad that began as the ‘Arab Spring’ spread across the Middle East North Africa or MENA region in 2011.
But instead of listening to the protestors’ demands, al-Assad brutally cracked down on them, igniting a conflict between forces loyal to him and opposition groups.
Foreign powers including the United States, Russia, Iran (and its proxy Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon) and Turkey, which borders Syria to the north, all got drawn into the conflict.
The GCR2P has blamed all parties to the conflict as having committed the most “rampant atrocity crimes, including the illegal use of chemical weapons”.
The crimes perpetrated by the belligerents include arbitrary abduction, arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, deaths in detention, ill-treatment, sexual and gender-based violence and systematic looting.
“In 2014 the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) declared a caliphate across Iraq and Syria and perpetrated widespread abuses against civilians until their defeat in 2019. Tens of thousands of people, mainly women and children, remain trapped in squalid detention camps run by the Kurdish-backed SDF,” the GCR2P noted.
Al-Assad’s departure has been prompted by the surprise advance of rebel groups towards Damascus in recent days. The groups, including the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, are now in the Syrian capital, asper latest media reports.
“More than 300,000 people have been uprooted in northwest Syria in recent days following the sudden and massive offensive into Government-controlled areas led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is sanctioned by the UN Security Council as a terrorist group,” according to the United Nations website.
“Carefully monitoring the fast-moving situation in Syria with concern. Our core teams remain on the ground to deliver assistance. All sides must ensure civilians are protected, can move freely, & access is facilitated to those in need of humanitarian support, wherever they are,” Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, posted on his X handle.
GCR2P has urged all parties to the conflict to uphold their obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law, including ending attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and facilitate unimpeded humanitarian access to civilians trapped or displaced by fighting.
“All parties should also uphold the ceasefire agreements in the northwest, northeast and south…The return of refugees and other displaced Syrians must be in accordance with the principle of non-refoulement…,” it stated.
Whether this can happen now that al-Assad is gone remains to be seen.