There has been no shortage of international outrage over the Syrian government’s military assault on rebel-held eastern Ghouta. Since mid-February, when Bashar al-Assad’s forces upped the ante in this suburb of Damascus, besieged for the past six years but now being bombarded from the air, and invaded on the ground, Western leaders have been united in condemnation of the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian backers. President Donald Trump has called for a ceasefire; British foreign secretary Boris Johnson has urged the West not ‘to stand idly by’ as Assad bombs his own people; and German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron seem to have made peace in Ghouta a personal mission, sending a co-signed public letter to Vladimir Putin, accusing Russia’s allies in Syria of ‘clear violations of international humanitarian law’.
It is a call that has resonated with its Western political audience. Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, recycling the rumours of chemical-weapons usage, has talked darkly of a ‘war crime’, while the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, has promised some form of legal retaliation: ‘Civilians are being pounded into submission or death. The perpetrators of these crimes must know they are being identified; that dossiers are being built up with a view to their prosecution; and that they will be held accountable for what they have done.’
So when the United Nations described the situation in Ghouta has ‘hell on Earth’, Western heads eagerly nodded in agreement. After all, why wouldn’t they? The brutal siege of and now attack on eastern Ghouta fits the West’s persistent, simple-minded narrative on Syria. This, so the story goes, is the longstanding tale of a yet another Middle Eastern dictator, struggling to maintain his grip on power except by means of military force, a tale of a bad man doing bad things to his own people. And in the background, of course, pulling the strings, is Putin’s Russia, backing the bad man with military force, and shoring up a corrupt regime at the expense of the Syrian people. In this telling, the US and its allies in NATO and the EU, appear as the good guys, supporting the Syrian rebels in their various guises against the bad guys, from Assad to Putin and Iran. And the assault on eastern Ghouta, like the siege of Aleppo before it, is proof positive of this narrative, a desperately grim manifestation of the baddie-driven dynamic impelling the Syrian conflict on.
As stated above, this is the persistent narrative on the Syrian conflict in the West. It is also a persistently misleading narrative. For a corrective, look no further than Afrin, both a city and region in north-eastern Syria, where an equally merciless assault on citizens has been carried out. First came the fighter planes and missiles just over six weeks ago, then the ground troops moved in. And now, the brutal triumph, with the invading fighters celebrating their victory in Afrin this weekend, turfing out their antagonists, and, with them, nearly 200,000 Afrin residents.
Yet there has been no condemnation of what has just happened in Afrin. The assault was just as merciless as the Syrian government’s on Ghouta. And the results have been just as dismaying, with countless Syrians losing their lives, and many, many more joining the hundreds of thousands of Syria’s displaced peoples. But the assault on Afrin has barely raised one of Boris Johnson’s befringed eyebrows.