The US government announced early last month that it would be providing a 6-month long amendment to its sanctions against the Syrian government, in order to ensure that humanitarian aid will not be blocked from reaching victims of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated northern Syria and southern Turkey. This served as an admission that the sanctions do in fact impede the delivery of aid, food, and other much needed supplies, contrdicting years of claims to the contrary. This yet again embarrasses Western corporate media outlets that HAD attempted to deny the affects of the sanctions.
More than 9 million Syrians have been affected by the devastating Turkey-Syria earthquake, according to the United Nations, as the death toll has now risen to over 57,000. The toll is expected to climb still, as rescue efforts continue in both nations, with fears over how bad the situation will be when Syria receives the aid it needs to uncover the remains of the largely unexplored rubble on its side of the border. According to the UN’s Population Fund, Syria is only equipped with around 400 shelters that can accommodate 50,000 people, meaning that hundreds of thousands had to sleep rough in sub-zero temperatures. Even months after the quake, its affects are still being felt.
Western sanctions blocking medial aid, food, and supplies is not a new issue unique to this disaster. It is clear that US sanctions did indeed block supplies, preventing aid for several days from reaching those in need, yet it is important to understand that this was not an accidental by-product of this effort — the US government sanctions campaign on Syria, from its inception, has primed the State for the suffering its people are today enduring.
UN experts have been sounding the alarm for years, with Alena Douhan last year visiting Syria on a fact finding mission and concluding that the sanctions had already created a humanitarian crisis in the country, urging the West to drop its unilateral measures immediately. The sanctions directly target reconstruction, which means that refurbishing and the upkeep of buildings was severely undermined, hence the sheer scale of the destruction. According to the US, the measures put in place to target civilian infrastructure and prevent post-war reconstruction are only to be lifted following a final peace treaty that is signed to end the war. Washington also illegally occupies a third of Syrian territory, keeping the most fertile agricultural lands and almost all of the nation’s oil and gas out of the hands of the Syrian government and effectively the Syrian people. There are many other elements to these deliberately cruel sanctions, which I have covered in other articles, that also act to compound other problems faced by the Syrian populace.
When the earthquake happened, the Western media quickly went to work in order to try and justify the brutal sanctions, in an attempt to address the calls of the Syrian government to lift them. Although, in the case of The New York Times, a piece was published on February 7, which was entitled “The only border crossing for aid between Syria and Turkey is closed”, the subheading of this article read “Syria is not able to receive direct aid from many countries because of sanctions, so the border crossing has been a lifeline”. The following day it was noted on social media that the title and subheading was changed in order to blame the Syrian government for not allowing the passage of aid, sanctions were no longer mentioned. This is not just dishonest journalism, it’s propaganda.
To its credit, the Associated Press released a report on the crisis addressing the impact of sanctions and stating that whilst they do not technically prevent aid, in reality they do block aid from reaching the Syrian people. As expected, the AP piece also attempts to blame the Syrian government for interfering with aid transfer, but redeems itself by also mentioning the fact that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group which the US government has verifiably supported and which controls much of Idlib near the aid crossing, is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and this also has a negative impact.
Despite the AP writing accurately that US sanctions directly impact aid, this did not stop pundits and other corporate media in the West from claiming that the sanctions do not impact relief aid. Perhaps the most shameless piece was published by The Washington Post, originally entitled “Don’t lift sanctions on Syria to help earthquake victims”, the title was later changed to “Lifting sanctions on Syria won’t help earthquake victims”. The article was an opinion piece written by Wa’el Alzayat, a former employee at the State Department and CEO of the pro-Israel Muslim group called Emgage that backed US President Joe Biden during his election campaign. Alzayat argues that the sanctions are a good thing, that they do not impact aid and that the Syrian government is primarily the problem when it comes to facilitating aid transfer.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the terrorist Wa’el Alzayat. @WaelAlzayat pic.twitter.com/6fQ2CoIi0E
— Kevork Almassian🇸🇾🇦🇲 (@KevorkAlmassian) February 10, 2023
The Washington Post is supposed to be a serious news outlet, with stringent fact checking performed by its editors, yet the outlet gave the Wa’el Alzayat the platform to openly lie about the situation in Syria and to be an apologist for sanctions which UN experts have argued is causing a humanitarian crisis of its own inside the country. The argument made in the piece is that talk of the sanctions having an effect on anything other than the Syrian military is Iranian and/or Russian propaganda and that the sanctions “have had no significant bearing on the delivery of humanitarian assistance”. Alzayat then makes the claim that “most of this assistance [foreign aid money] is actually spent in regime-controlled areas, because the regime prohibits most of this aid from ever reaching opposition-held communities”, which is an outright lie.
He then makes the argument that the Russian government has managed to “hold the [UN] Security Council hostage by forcing it to agree to a single border crossing from Turkey into northern Syria”, a laughable claim that in the same paragraph Alzayat attempts to frame under the same circumstances that existed in the early years of the war in Syria. This misleading framing relies on the readers lack of understanding of Syria’s geography and who occupies what territory in order for the propaganda to work. For anyone with an understanding of the situation, this is transparently deceptive.
To begin with, the Syrian government constantly, almost every 6 months, when the question of aid avenues is brought up at the UN, urges the international body to permit aid to travel through Syrian government-held territory. The sole aid crossing, for years, into Syria, has been the Bab al-Hawa crossing, which is the only avenue that was granted a UN mandate for the transfer of legal aid to the country. Bab al-Hawa crossing is located in an area held primarily by the terrorist organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has been documented to have hoarded relief aid and recently rejected Syrian government aid that was offered to civilians living inside the territory that it occupies. On the other side, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was just praised by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, for allowing the opening of two additional border crossings, both of which are located along the Turkish border with militant-held Idlib.
The Western media and its paid propagandist operatives were then embarrassed when the US gave its tacit recognition of the effect that the sanctions are having on aid transfer, by temporarily lifting some of their sanctions for a 6-month period in order to allow aid to be transferred into Syria. If the sanctions did not effect the transfer of aid, there would be no need for the US to freeze its sanctions, which proves the sadistic nature of those who drafted them in the first place. The temporary lifting of some sanctions shouldn’t now be praised as somehow representing a humanitarian gesture, but rather a move which takes pressure and attention away from how they affect Syrian civilians.
Because of the remaining sanctions, in addition to the refusal of the West to deliver aid through Damascus itself and focus any major effort on the Syrian government-held areas, it is also doubtful that the affects of temporarily lifting the sanctions will be sufficient to help those suffering fully recover. The situation is only as dire as it is today because the sanctions crippled the nation to such a degree that they could not handle the natural disaster, and the isolation, in addition to the collapse of the country’s economy, made the impact of the earthquake much more severe.
There is simply no legal argument for maintaining not only the sanctions but also the occupation of a third of Syria by the US military. Syria (like Libya before it) was a country that was excelling in multiple fields, including healthcare, exports, education, and was completely self-sufficient prior to the dirty-war launched against it — despite the baseless claims often made to the contrary. Syria now has one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the world, with the civilian population suffering in complete ruin. This is the doing of the West, its sanctions, and its military occupation of Syrian lands. What makes things worse is that even after a tragedy like this earthquake, the West still engages in the same tactics and some of the most trusted news outlets in the world will publish distortions and outright lies to justify policies which are killing Syrian civilians.
