It's time to help Syria get back on its feet

Syrian and Lebanese refugees travel to the Massna border crossing with Syria on foot after Israeli strikes rendered the main road unusable. EPA

Israel’s months-long war in Lebanon has, among other things, displaced more than a million people in the country.

Official estimates suggest that since September, close to half a million of them have escaped to Syria. Many of these men, women and children were already refugees, having fled the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 to find safety in Lebanon.

Israel’s stated mission to degrade Hezbollah has also led to direct attacks inside Syria, where the Iran-backed group is allied to the government of President Bashar Al Assad. Towns in southern and south-western Syria, especially Al Qusayr and the surrounding countryside, have for more than a decade been Hezbollah domains. These areas have thus been the focus of Israeli strikes in the past week, as the one last Wednesday, in Palmyra, that killed 36 people and the one in the previous week where, Israeli air strikes hit the Syrian capital Damascus, killing 15 people.

But Syria’s challenges are not limited to Israel’s intensified air campaign and the influx of returning refugees. There has also been violence in Syria’s north-east, where Turkish forces hit targets linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – a group that Ankara, the US and EU have listed as a terrorist organisation. There is an acute humanitarian crisis in a region devastated not only by the civil war but also by years of extreme drought exacerbated by climate change.

With the government in Damascus in control of just 70 per cent of Syria, it is ill-equipped to deal with the country’s multifarious and multidimensional crises. As of last year, more than 7 million people were internally displaced. While the civil war has been in suspended animation for years, this situation is untenable both politically as well as from a humanitarian standpoint – particularly as instability has increasingly put a strain on civilian populations in Syria and other countries in the neighbourhood.

On Sunday, UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen was in Damascus to address the government’s resource shortages exacerbated by the recently returned refugees. “We need to see that the international community lives up to its responsibility and increases its funding to Syria in this very critical situation,” Mr Pedersen said.

With the world’s global and regional powers focused on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Levant, particularly at a time when violence has intensified in both regions in recent days, Syria’s humanitarian crisis risks being forgotten.

To be sure, efforts have been made over the past 18 months to return the country to the international fold. The Arab League admitted Damascus back years after suspending it over the government’s violent reaction to internal protests. Further, China pledged to help the Assad government reconstruct the war-torn country, with President Xi Jinping calling on western powers to lift sanctions that have only served to affect the humanitarian response.

The time has come for Syria to heal its wounds. As a first step, Syria’s rich social fabric needs to be repaired. The impetus must be on reviving the UN-facilitated peace process that seeks to reconcile the government and the many opposition groups with an aim to amend the current Constitution or adopt a new one. In turn, the international community needs to bolster the state’s ability to provide for its people, including the displaced and refugees, by increasing aid to it. The €5 million ($5.2 million) allocated by the EU this month is a step in that direction, but it is not nearly enough.

A stable Middle East relies in large part on putting a once-vibrant country, which has been broken for much of the past decade, back together.