The fragile ceasefire in Syria, uneasily maintained over the last month, now seems to be in tatters as Bashar al-Assad carried out a series of airstrikes against rebel targets all over the country. Not only is it all but guaranteed that the rebels will strike back, there is now a very real possibility that the first round of peace talks, scheduled for April 9 in Geneva to discuss a political settlement, may be called off. Assad’s aggression was probably meant to change the ground realities in Syria so that the opposition groups would be forced to accept his determination to carry on in power but, as with everything else Assad does, it will only push the country further into violence and chaos. Russia, which had begun to reduce its military commitment in Syria, is now discussing being drawn back in – this time in an alliance with the US – to take back the Islamic State headquarters of Raqqa. This is an action which was predictable after the carnage in Belgium but the Islamic State is so entrenched in Raqqa that defeating it will be bloody and is likely to be unsuccessful. The US is also considering sending more special forces into Syria, which shows only that it has learned little from Iraq and its other Middle Eastern entanglements.
With Assad, the US and Russia all deciding to deepen their commitment to a violent solution, it is no surprise that Turkey too has been involved. Both Assad and the Russians have accused Erdogan of funding and equipping the Islamic State, with Assad even calling the Islamic State ‘Erdogan’s army of terrorists’. Hyperbolic that may be, but Turkey has cynically sought to take advantage of the chaos in Iran first by undermining Assad, who is allied to Turkey’s rival Iran, and then by going after its own Kurdish separatists. Now, according to Amnesty International, Turkey is sending back thousands of Syrian refugees to a country where they have only death and deprivation to face. Since Greece, the main point of entry into Europe for Syrian refugees is sending refugees who arrive on its shores back to Turkey, official European policy is the de facto return of refugees to Syria. These are the real victims of superpower meddling in Syria; and all the talk of using military might to impose a solution on the country will fall on deaf ears so long as they have such a dismissive attitude towards the hundreds of thousands of refugees.