Eastern Ghouta, a lush, semiagricultural region just 10 miles northeast of Syria’s capital, was once the breadbasket of Damascus. Known for its liberal-minded residents, religious and ethnic diversity, democratically inclined politicians, and independently wealthy entrepreneurs, it has long been loathed by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his regime. In August 2013, Eastern Ghouta was the target of the Syrian government’s sarin gas attack, which killed 1,466 people in a single night, mostly women and children.
In the immediate aftermath of the sarin massacre, facing the credible threat of international force, the Assad regime ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and agreed to hand over its stockpile to Russia. For a few weeks, the airstrikes ceased. Then, in October, the Syrian military began its siege of Eastern Ghouta in earnest.
Siege has been a central part of Assad’s response to the popular uprising, evident since the first siege of the city of Daraa in March 2011. By the fall of 2016, Assad’s forces were besieging more than 1.2 million civilians — in large urban areas such as eastern Aleppo, small civilian towns such as Darayya, and Palestinian refugee camps such as Yarmouk. Other armed groups have also besieged civilians — the Islamic State besieged 80,000 people in Deir Ezzor, and Sunni opposition forces besieged 20,000 Shiite civilians near Idlib — but the numbers have not been nearly as high. The number of civilians besieged by the Syrian government today is approximately 700,000. More than half — 390,000 of them — are in Eastern Ghouta.
Sieges of combatants to induce their surrender are considered lawful warfare. But the Assad regime employs siege aimed at civilians in opposition-held areas as a form of collective punishment and control. That is a war crime. International humanitarian law requires free movement of civilians and humanitarian access to them — both of which have been routinely denied by Assad’s forces. The Syrian regime’s strategy targets civilians not only where they are commingled with combatants but also in purely civilian towns. The suffering caused by siege is slow and almost invisible.
Responsibility for this grim state of affairs lies mainly with the Syrian authorities, but U.N. humanitarian agencies, faced with the unenviable task of negotiating with a regime that has no qualms about killing civilians, have often played along. The posture adopted by senior U.N. staff assumes that whatever good they may be doing justifies the cover they provide for the sieges and other attacks.
The reality suggests otherwise. Darayya, an impoverished Sunni town a few miles south of Damascus, was besieged beginning in November 2012. The Syrian regime justified the siege by depicting the town as a military base so no humanitarian or medical aid was permitted to reach it. When U.N. officials finally visited in May 2016, they were shocked to find it was a community of some 8,300 women, children, and elderly civilians.
In another instance, in 2015 the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) entered into an agreement with the Syrian government. On paper, the agreement provided a mechanism to evacuate sick patients from four towns: Zabadani and Madaya, besieged by pro-government forces, and Foua and Kefraya, besieged by armed opposition groups. In practice, it meant that people in areas besieged by the regime died. Regardless of whether the critically ill patient in Madaya was a schoolchild with meningitis, a mother with a complicated pregnancy, or a grandmother with breast cancer, evacuation had to wait until someone became ill enough to need evacuation from the opposition-besieged areas, even though those towns had the advantage of receiving government-organized airdrops of food, fuel, and medicine and did not face ongoing airstrikes by pro-regime forces. These rules applied even to 5-year-old kids suffering landmine injuries — very few of whom survived the wait.
In the same year, at the insistence of the Syrian government, OCHA removed every reference to “siege” or “besieged” from its 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan — a tacit recognition by the Assad authorities that their use of siege constitutes a war crime and a disturbing willingness on the part of OCHA to cover up that conduct.
