Earthquake thrusts Syria back in the spotlight, but for how long?

The decimation of Syria after nearly 12 years of civil war has long since fallen off the public’s radar. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday morning has put Syria back on the map, but whether the war-torn country stays there once the initial shock and sympathy wear off is another question. Joshua Landis, a widely respected Syria expert who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, isn’t optimistic. “The United States set as one of its goals to hinder serious reconstruction after the war until [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] makes political concessions — until there’s a political solution,” though it’s unclear what that solution should be, he told Devex. “And so this [earthquake] is of course going to put pressure on the West to soften that stance on reconstruction because there is so much humanitarian need, but my hunch is that there will be some short-term money thrown at this, but people will forget it pretty quickly. I hate to say that because … Syria needs a gamechanger.” Delivering humanitarian relief for devastating natural disasters — the death toll in Turkey and Syria is nearly 4,000 and climbing as of this report — is always daunting. But in Syria, you have the added complications of several parallel, but politically fraught, rescue efforts: Those in the rebel-held pockets of the northwest, where Turkey holds sway; Kurdish-controlled regions in the northeast, which Turkey views as enemy territory; and large swathes held by Assad, the erstwhile international pariah whose brutal crackdown on the 2011 uprising killed hundreds of thousands of people, razed much of the country’s infrastructure, and cratered its economy. Devex spoke to Landis, who lived in the Middle East for 15 years and spent most summers in Syria before the uprising, about what happens now. Below are excerpts from our interview, which have been edited for length and clarity. Obviously, we're talking about a horrible humanitarian situation here. Where do you even begin? I spoke to my brother-in-law and parents-in-law this morning. And they live in Latakia, which is the northernmost city in Syria, on the coast. And they said they had the night from hell. There were three different quakes, but the first one, of course, was the monster quake, and they thought their apartment was coming down because it was moving so dramatically. A friend of mine was tweeting images from Aleppo and … one apartment building after another had come down … so this is just adding insult to injury and poor Syria can't withstand this much more. And Syrians right now are in the midst of winter cold, there is no heating, and there's not enough electricity. They're getting electricity for an hour a day maximum, and people can't run their generators because there’s not enough oil and gas. And this means that people are freezing. Who do you see being the main humanitarian actors moving forward? Primarily it’s going to be the United Nations … because they have people on the ground that can deliver aid quickly. Now, Turkey is a big country with a military that can move in and help people out. With Syria, it's much more complicated, and that's going to require NGOs. In Syria proper, run by the Assad government, the U.N. can play a big role. The U.N. has been reluctant to do that in the northern rebel regions because the rebels are insurgents who are illegal, according to international law, and the U.N. has to work with international law. The opposition community has criticized them bitterly for working with the [Assad] government, but this is unfortunately what the U.N. has to do around the world — is work with dictators, in sometimes unfavorable situations where government agencies rake off 20% or 25% because they charge prices to distribute aid and so forth. And so this is part of doing business, but of course, in Syria, it comes under even greater scrutiny because Assad is an enemy of the United States, and the U.S. tried to overturn him and failed. Syria is allied to Iran and to Russia, which makes it even more important for the United States to hurt Syria and hurt Syrians. And so the sanctions are designed of course to starve Syrians, and yet the aid is at the same time trying to feed them, so it's a rather contradictory policy. The problem is that Assad won this war; he's not going to be overthrown from sanctions. Do you foresee that now there might be a better chance for the U.N. to operate in the rebel-held north given the sheer devastation of the quake? I think they will. There are all kinds of NGOs that are working hand in glove with the U.N. There's a lot of ways to get around [Assad]. What about Turkey? Are they going to be the main actor in terms of humanitarian relief, at least immediately? Yes, they will be. They will be in the northwest — because in the northeast … the majority of rebel-held territory is run by the Kurds and a Kurdish organization, the YPG, which Turkey has designated as a terrorist organization. The YPG happens to be America's main proxy militia that helped America destroy ISIS, so America and Turkey are at daggers drawn in Syria. Is there a role for U.S. aid in YPG-held territory? Yes, the U.S. will undoubtedly send aid into this region. Israel has said it will send aid into Turkey and I imagine they’ll try to send some to the Kurdish region as well. Do you think aid money for Syria will simply be repackaged funding? Or could this earthquake change the dynamics and refocus attention and new money going to Syria? Syria is very underfunded, and the U.N. had to cut back its food packages even at a time when Syrians were getting more and more needy because they didn't have enough donations and because inflation ate away [at those donations]. Their wheat and flour packages, once the Ukraine war started, went up 30%. So they had a designated amount of money, but all of a sudden, you need 30% more money to fill up all the food baskets. People didn't just step up and start increasing aid because aid all over the world got much more expensive very quickly because of the Ukraine war. And so that's been a big challenge. And really, Ukraine is sucking all the oxygen out of the aid tent if you will, because people are sending their money to Ukraine, and then forgetting about Syria. Do you think there's a chance, given the dire economic straits in Assad-held territory even before the earthquake, that the wealthy classes or military could overthrow him? No, no, no, no, no. You’d need somebody to overthrow Assad. … It's quite clear that Assad will do anything to stay in power, as he did viciously throughout the civil war to win, no matter how many people he needed to kill. And so there's unlikely to be a coup because the top 40 officers in the military all share the same [Alawite] religion as the president. They’re a minority group who fear that they'll be ethnically cleansed if they lose to the Islamist rebels. They're supported by the Christians and other religious minorities as well who all fear these Islamist rebels taking over. So, because of this religious distrust, it's unlikely that his own people will overthrow him because they see him in many ways as someone who saved their skins. They may not like him [but] they see him as better than the alternative. So that's why America's policies in Syria have failed so miserably because we don't know how to get rid of the guy but we don't want the Islamists to win.