The heart-wrenching photo of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year old Syrian toddler whose lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach, has shaken the conscience of the entire humanity. And this single picture has become the symbol of the refugee crisis, the worst the world is witnessing now… ever since the horrors of World War II. Millions of people who are caught up in the wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen are fleeing their countries to escape violence. And a majority of them are trying to cross the hostile Mediterranean Sea in crammed dinghy boats in their bid to enter the European countries. So far, as many as 2,500 refugees, mostly children are reported to have perished in their bid to cross the borders.
The United States fuelled the conflicts in all the five nations from which most of the refugees are fleeing. It is directly responsible for the trouble in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya while it is covertly supporting the players who want to destabilise Syria and Yemen. The US’s decade-long war in Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ has resulted in the death of over a million people there and has led to birth of Al-Qaeda.
Far from expressing remorse, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions was “worth it”. Apart from incalculable loss of life and destruction, over 3.3 million people in Iraq have been displaced because of the violence initiated by the US’s attack and occupation of Iraq.
In Afghanistan, the violence triggered by the US on the ploy of routing out Taliban for its alleged role of 9/11 has failed in its stated mission. Taliban continues to thrive in Afghanistan and in the recent times, Barack Obama has even permitted the Afghanistan government to negotiate with the Talibans to end the turmoil in the country. As Afghanistan continues to bleed for 14 years due to the U.S. invasion, there are 2.6 million Afghan refugees as per the UN report.
The US-led NATO bombing of Libya destroyed the stability in the nation, fomenting anarchy that led to the rise of ISIS affiliates in northern Africa. Thousands of Libyans are fleeing the country, often on dangerous raft-less boats to cross the Sea waters.
Syria was relatively a peaceful country until the interventionist policies pursued by the Obama administration pushed it to mayhem and to a point of no return. The Sunni-Shia sectarianism hardly existed in Syria and the Assad regime had both of them in its Ba’ath party. The US got an opportunity to interfere in the Syrian affairs, when a popular rebellion started as a response to the imprisonment of some school children was grossly mishandled by the Bashar Al Assad administration. The school boys had painted on their school building the famous saying from the Arab revolts al-sha’ab yourid isqat al-nizam (the people want the fall of the regime). The boys were imprisoned by the local police and when their parents demanded their release, they were reportedly abused and threatened. There were peaceful protests against this incident which were retaliated by the State authorities with brute force.
Then, there was an explosion of protests in several parts of the country which had culminated into anti-Assad campaign. The Syrian Uprising was gradually hijacked by the ISIS and other splinter groups which tore apart the nation on sectarian lines. The ISIS has become a formidable force which has captured huge caches of advanced weapons from the Iraqi army that fled and had been supplied by the U.S. As irony would have it, the US is in a catch-22 position in Syria.
On the one hand it is spending about $ 1 billion a year in covert military assistance to the rebel groups in Syria to overthrow its President Bashar Al Assad. At the same time, the US is spending $10 million a day for an average 6,500 airstrikes on ISIS in Syria. According to a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has since 2011, spent an estimated $7.7 billion in Syria in combined military and “humanitarian” aid – much of which ends up in the hands of ISIS.
Even as Barack Obama had been waiting impatiently to see the fall of Bashar Al Assad before he could take upon the ISIS in Syria (obviously to repeat what was done to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and to make Syria as a client state), his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has openly supported the Assad regime and sent a fresh contingent of military equipment to the Syrian government to fight the ISIS. This Moscow strategy must have baffled the US. The US is unlikely to accept the Russian invitation to direct its efforts to fight the ISIS along with Moscow, because it amounts to fighting to stabilise the very regime it sought to overthrow.
The Syrian people can no longer afford to become the victims of the interventionist policies of the powers that be. There must be an urgent stop to the plight of scores of hapless men, women and children of Syria who are craving for peace in their country. And certainly, there should not be any more Aylan Kurdis. It is high time, all the players on the chess-board of Syria – the US, Russia, EU, Turkey, Iran (and of course the United Nations which has so far failed to bring peace in West Asia) – made coordinated efforts in Syria to find an amicable solution to the region.