Written by Patrick Glastonbury
Hamza al-Khatib was a thirteen-year-old Syrian boy who participated in non-violent protests in the city of Daraa in 2011. Government forces reacted violently to the demonstrations, causing al-Khatib to be separated from his family.
A month later, the boy’s body was sent to the home of his family. al-Khatib had been severely tortured before being killed, and his body was mutilated.
The crisis in Syria began in 2011, and since then, reporting on the issue has failed to convey the reality of the human tragedy taking place. Too often, the complexity of the situation is reduced to an easily understandable conflict between Islamic radicalism and an authoritarian government.
Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab, authors of “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War,” spoke on Tuesday, April 5, during which they addressed the issues of the Syrian revolution and the failures of media coverage. While attempting to make sense of the chaos behind the fog of war, the narrative established in the media has been, in their words, “appallingly bad.”
In the years since 2011, 500,000 Syrians have died in the crisis, with 94 percent perishing at the hands of their own government. Further, 12 million people, one half of the entire population of Syria have been displaced from their homes; another 1 million are currently live under conditions of starvation.
According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, the calamity of the Syrian revolution began with peaceful demonstrations from the majority of the people of Syria. The government responded violently, practicing “torture on an industrial scale,” said Al-Shami, in tandem with raping and pillaging the people of dissident villages and towns.
What began as civil resistance on the part of the people, in the form of civil rights and humanitarian groups, newspapers, and radio stations, quickly escalated into civil militarization.
The people took up arms to defend their homes and neighborhoods, and organized themselves into hundreds of different militias. The effect of this militarization was to turn a horizontally-oriented, grassroots mass movement into a clash between hierarchical militias competing for scarce resources.
The resulting militarization was not spontaneous, but was deliberately affected by government forces enacting a strategy meant to split the opposition. Yassin-Kassab noted that the government released religious radicals from prison with instructions to attack villages of different religious traditions. The sectarian violence which ensued distracted from the efforts to overthrow the Assad regime, demonstrating the efficacy of Assad’s efforts to divide and conquer.
The Syrian revolution of 2011 began with the intention of democratic reform and involved the participation of a majority of Syrians. In the years since, the rise of ISIS overshadowed initial democratic urges, and now the media’s commentary on Syria has devolved into platitudes about Islamic radicalism and continuing concerns about sectarian violence.
The consequences of the non-involvement of the U.S. and other Western governments have been severe. While in 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein under the auspices of freedom and democracy, in 2011, the U.S. remained uninvolved in efforts for democracy initiated by the Syrians themselves. As a result, the Assad regime was in a position to set the tone of the entire conflict: Islamic radicalism versus the Assad government.
Jane Murphy, an Associate Professor of History at CC and an expert in Middle Eastern studies, noted that the sectarian violence associated with Western understandings of the Middle East is actually a recent development in history, directly related to the legacy of Western interventionism. She said that, despite the prevailing misconceptions, “there is not a lot of interest in a more complicated picture.”
Yassin-Kassab made a similar observation about the Assad regime’s efforts to stoke the flames of sectarian conflict. He described how media portrayal of sectarian violence as rooted in a centuries-old conflict between Sunni and Shia actually misses the point. For him, the conflict is political rather than religious, as religious tensions have been cultivated in political machinations.
The movement in Syria began with calls for freedom, dignity, and social justice, but with the maneuverings of the Assad regime, it is now understood as a battle between two evils, neither of which is lesser. The mobilization of religious differences as a means to maintain power has worked for Assad, both within Syria and abroad. Talk of Syria in the media has become trite, in the sense that there is no effort to see through the shadow of Islamic extremism.
Hiding behind facts, figures, and the familiar may be easier than offering a nuanced narrative of the Syrian revolution, but the misunderstanding and corresponding lack of intervention has its own consequences. The lifetime prospects of millions of Syrians have gone up in flames, all while the world watched.
With no chance at building a livelihood, the young Syrian of today may be the terrorist of tomorrow, as the compensation for the families of suicide bombers is more money than one could hope to earn through work in such a context.
“[There is an] increasing gap between the rhetoric American citizens identify with and believe about democracy, and the actions we take on the international stage,” said Professor Murphy. Meanwhile, the world continues to watch Syria burn, as millions of lives are disrupted and destroyed.