U.S. cautious on Syria earthquake diplomacy
The US Ambassador to the UN said the United States will be watching closely a Feb. 13 Syria/UN deal on opening aid crossings before moving ahead with UN Security Council action.
The death toll in the wake of the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey and northwest Syria on February 6 has surpassed 40,000 people, a scale of loss of life and devastation for the survivors that is hard to fathom, and which is being powerfully documented by the Washington Post’s Louisa Loveluck and NPR’s Ruth Sherlock.
On Feb. 13, a week after the devastating quake, the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad struck a deal with the United Nations to open two additional crossings into the country from Turkey to facilitate getting humanitarian aid in, though Syrian opposition groups, and not the regime, control the territory where the aid crossings are located. In the earthquake response, some analysts see Assad pursuing an opening to try to restore his international recognition, after he has faced a decade of pariah status for killing millions of his own citizens in Syria’s civil war, including with chemical weapons.
The United States is signaling that it will watch closely how a Syrian commitment to the United Nations to open two additional aid crossings for three months is implemented as it holds off for now on pushing a UN Security Council resolution on expanded aid access.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a phone call with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday (Feb. 14), “underscored the need for the Assad regime to meet its commitment, as stated to the UN on Feb. 13, to open the Bab Al Salaam and Al Rai border crossings for humanitarian purposes, including through Security Council authorization if necessary,” a State Department readout of the call said.
But the readout suggested that the U.S. is keeping the option for Security Council action later.
“The Secretary noted that an expanded resolution would give the UN and humanitarian actors the flexibility and predictability they need to more effectively deliver aid to people in need in Syria,” the readout continued.
UN Secretary General Guterres on Tuesday insisted that the deal was working.
“The two crossings are open,” Guterres told reporters in a press encounter appealing for $400 million to address the humanitarian needs of Syria’s earthquake victims. “Movements are taking place. And we will see, of course, if the situation would change, we would adopt the necessary measures. But as I said: The crossings are open, and goods are flowing.”
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield acknowledged that the aid is flowing now, but said American officials would be vigilantly watching what happens.
“It’s flowing now, let’s admit that,” Thomas-Greenfield told reporters Tuesday. “But we need to watch this carefully. We need to monitor it carefully. And again, as the Secretary-General said earlier, we need a resolution, so we will be watching it closely.
“If the aid is flowing and it's flowing unfettered, and NGOs and the UN are able to get in without being blocked, and the people in need are getting the assistance they need, that’s good,” the US envoy continued. “But we have to watch to see that that happens. It took seven days to get this decision to allow the borders to be open. That decision should have been made on day one.”
Some regional players seem to be trying to advance Assad’s reintegration into the region. United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (ABZ) met with Assad in Damascus on February 12, and subsequently met with Blinken in Washington on Feb. 14.
The US readout of their meeting was opaque about what ABZ conveyed in regards to his consultations in Damascus, and what if any was Blinken’s response.
“The Secretary and Foreign Minister discussed the devastating earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria, as well as the U.S. and UAE’s humanitarian assistance to those affected,” the State Department readout said.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi met with Assad in Damascus today.
A Saudi plane carrying humanitarian relief supplies landed in Aleppo, in government-controlled northwest Syria, on Tuesday, “the first such shipment by the kingdom to Bashar al-Assad-controlled territory since the Syrian war erupted over a decade ago,” Agence France Press reported.
“The UAE believes Assad is staying, and it’s better to get him back into the Arab League before Iran controls Syria 100%,” former Syrian diplomat turned opposition activist Bassam Barabandi said. “They work with Russian on this idea.”
“For Assad, the best thing that could happen to him is to be recognized by the U.S., the minimum is to waive the sanctions,” Barabandi continued. “The U.S. started a conversation with [the Damascus regime] in the U.N. a few months ago regarding [missing US journalist] Austin Tice, and both sides agreed then that this is the first step.”
“Today with the earthquake crisis, it may open a new window for a conversation between the U.S. and Assad,” Barabandi observed.
The State Department, asked if there had been conversations between the US and Syrian regime officials, sidestepped a direct response.
“I’m not in a position to speak to any high-level contact, and I couldn’t say what…may have happened at a lower level, an operational level on the ground, for instance,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told journalists at the department briefing Tuesday.
“But the message that we’re sending to the Assad regime is precisely what I said: We are seeking to assist the Syrian people first and foremost,” Price continued. “We want to see aid flow unhindered between parts of Syria and across the border into Syria.”
The deal struck this week between Assad and the UN on the additional border crossings is temporary, noted Charles Lister, director of the Syrian program at the Middle East Institute. And the next UN Security Council vote on renewing the single border crossing at Bab al-Hawa is in July. In the negotiations leading up to that is when the Assad regime might press to try to get sanctions dropped or international reconstruction support, he suggested.
“I think this is when the regime puts its big demands on the table,” Lister suggested. “We will only allow you to have this single border crossing, or, if the regime is super pragmatic, it might even offer the other two as well but on the condition that, for example, sanctions are dropped and the international community begins supporting Syria's reconstruction. I think the regime feels confident enough now and with sufficient leverage that it could start to make those asks.”
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Before you go:
‘Puncturing Putin’s hubris’
CIA Director and veteran diplomat Bill Burns, accepting an award from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service on February 2, said the next six months on the Ukraine battlefield are critical to “puncturing Putin’s hubris” and “making clear that he's not only not going to be able to advance further in Ukraine, but as every month goes by, he runs a greater and greater risk of losing the territory that is illegally seized from Ukraine so far”:
“I think the next six months--…it's our assessment at CIA--are going to be critical. You know, Putin, I think is betting right now that he can make time work for him. He's betting that he could grind down Ukrainians, that political fatigue is going to set in Europe. Putin's view of us as Americans is always that we have attention deficit disorder, and we'll move on to some other problem. …I think that that Russian calculation is as deeply flawed as the original decision to go to war last February 24 was as well.”
“I think what's going to be the key, …because…we do not assess that Putin is serious about negotiations … [is] puncturing Putin’s hubris; making clear that he's not only not going to be able to advance further in Ukraine, but as every month goes by, he runs a greater and greater risk of losing the territory that is illegally seized from Ukraine so far. So this next period, I think, is going to be absolutely crucial.”
And have been remiss in not earlier recommending some colleagues’ ‘stacks have been enjoying reading:
Brian Rosenwald’s
Peter Osnos
Letters from an American
Jenny’s Three Things
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