The visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the broken nation of Syria has underscored his country’s involvement and role in the bloody civil war there — an intervention that has resulted in saving the regime of President Bashar Al Assad from imminent demise. But while Putin has now ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria, that does not mean the conflict is over, that normality has returned, or that Al Assad’s long-term future is secured. The reality is far different.
Syria is but a shell of a land, its cities broken and levelled, its ground soaked in the blood of the countless thousands who have died, and barren from the millions who have walked away and now live beyond its borders, hoping that one day they may be able to return to their homes.
The Russian intervention ensured the survival of Al Assad and his murderous regime, a government that was at breaking pointing in 2015 when Putin’s forces dominated the air and turned the ground wars in his favour. To what extent those forces were involved in barrel bombing of civilian centres, or the surgical air strikes on key anti-Al Assad positions, or on hitting the broken medical facilities for those injured on the ground, will never be fully explained. Nor will there be any accounting of the role of those forces in the mass starvations endured by what remained of civilian centres in isolated pockets of resistance.
It is said that the victors write the history of conflict. If that is the case, then Russian pens will ink the importance of peace talks in Astana and Sochi, where Russians, Iranians and Syrians put in process a peace road map that sees Al Assad remain in power. That is a sanitised and bleached telling of events.
The reality is far different.
The agreements cobbled together in Sochi and Astana are but paper, the entreaties signed there not worth one drop of all the blood shed in Syria these past six years. These agreements lack the legitimacy of the Geneva talks, the series of negotiations sanctioned by the United Nations, and to which the combined opposition forces acknowledge as being the only set that matters.
Over these past bloody years, the only consistency — apart from the killing and brutality — has been the unwavering demand that Al Assad must go. As long as he remains in power, there will never be peace in Syria. Nor will there be justice. And for those murdered, gassed and starved, justice is the only salve that matters.
