The Obama administration prefers not to notice that its diplomatic strategy in Syria has fallen apart.
The Obama administration has chosen not to spotlight what by most definitions are widespread and systematic war crimes. On occasion, it blames the Syrian Air Force for bombing hospitals and other civilian targets but rarely discusses Russian violations. It doesn’t even share with the public the rampant infractions of the cease-fire it is overseeing. That’s all classified.
Instead, U.S. officials have repeatedly focused attention on al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front.
In a series of inaccurate or loosely worded statements, officials have implied Nusra Front has a major presence in Aleppo — assertions that the Russian and Syrian governments could interpret, or exploit, as an invitation to carry on with the bombardment.
The tally of missile, bomb, and artillery attacks on the city suggests that the primary target is civilians, not moderate rebel forces supported by the United States, and certainly not Nusra Front, whose presence in the city by most estimates is modest.
Syrian Civil Defense, the white-helmeted volunteers who say they have saved more than 40,000 people from the rubble after government attacks, published a daily listing of cease-fire violations until April 26, when its own training center in Atarib, west of Aleppo, was the target of a coordinated attack of two air-to-ground missiles and one surface-to surface missile, which killed five rescue workers.
But the group continues its rescue work and monitoring. Between April 24 and May 1, Syrian Civil Defense documented the following attacks in Aleppo: 260 airstrikes, 110 artillery bombardments, 18 surface-to-surface missiles, and 68 suspected barrel bombs.
Three medical centers were bombed out of service in that horrific week: al-Quds hospital, al-Marja Medical Center, and Bustan al-Qasr Medical Center, the group said. Altogether, 189 civilians were killed, including 40 children, and 394 civilians wounded, including 96 children.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group, said that 279 civilians had been killed in Aleppo between April 22 and May 3 — 155 of them in opposition-held areas and 124 in government-held districts.
The Aleppo City Council said Sunday that 65 died at al-Quds hospital; a bakery, a medicines depot, a water facility, three mosques, ambulances, and multiple residential neighborhoods were also hit.
Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, laid the blame for the escalation at the feet of the Syrian government. “While all sides have contributed to the violence the military escalation was attributable largely to the actions of a singular party: the Assad regime,” she said this week.
But Osama Taljo, a member of the Aleppo council, told Foreign Policy that one of the rebel fighting groups, Tajamu Fastaqim, claimed that the warplane that bombed the hospital was Russian, based on the reports of plane-spotters stationed by rebels near regime and Russian air bases.
The only party that knows for sure the extent of Russian involvement is the U.S. government. But it won’t share its intelligence. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that the Russians “are clear that they were not engaged or flying at that time” and said the Syrian government had a track record of bombing rescuers and health care workers. But he didn’t say what the U.S. government has determined from its own intelligence — nor does his spokesman when asked at daily briefings.
“We just continue to not find it helpful to read out every single violation,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said on April 28, when asked why the United States didn’t list recorded breaches of the cessation of hostilities. Asked specifically about the prospect that Russian airstrikes were breaching the partial cease-fire the following day, Kirby said that the current period amounted to “a test for the Russians” of their seriousness of adhering to the agreement.
With U.S. aircraft crossing Syrian airspace every day on bombing runs against the Islamic State, “I am 100 percent certain we know who is flying where,” said Christopher Kozak of the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “The fact we don’t want to talk about it is very distressing.”
A senior administration official told FP the information about which air force is bombing which target is classified to protect “sources and methods” of collection. Making it public “would also set a precedent of the U.S. reporting on foreign military activity. Where do you draw the line?”
The U.S. attempts to work with Russia amid the ongoing offensive, however, has damaged its credibility among opposition members.
“How can the international community accept that Russia is one of the countries who monitor the cease-fire while Russia is bombing? How can the criminal become a cease-fire keeper?” Taljo asked.
But there is logic to the silence. The administration “want[s] to work as brokers in the peace process,” setting up local cease-fire arrangements and mediating between the warring parties, said Kozak.
Kozak criticized the U.S government for becoming dependent on the good intentions of Moscow, long one of the Syrian regime’s most important international backers. “It feels very much as if we’ve pinned a lot of hopes on a great power political settlement of the conflict in which we are willing to believe the lies the Russians tell us to our faces in order to make it easier to believe in a settlement,” he said.
The senior U.S. official did not share that negative view of Russian behavior but acknowledged that much of U.S. policy was focused on working with Moscow.
The senior U.S. official did not share that negative view of Russian behavior but acknowledged that much of U.S. policy was focused on working with Moscow. “A lot of what we’re trying to do is de-escalation and refocus on positive counter-ISIL actions the Russians could be taking,” the official said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
The Obama administration even appears to have backed off its tentative warnings that it would consider using military force if the cessation of hostilities failed and it determined Russia was insincere in its diplomatic efforts. In February, Kerry referred multiple times to a “Plan B” if peace talks failed, saying the war “could get a lot uglier” for Russia in that event.
But with diplomatic efforts now in tatters and violence in Syria surging back to its previous highs, U.S. officials are denying that they ever had any intention to escalate the use of force. Kirby, the State Department spokesman, last week shot down any thoughts of an alternative to the current track, deriding what he described as a “mythical plan B.”
“Look, what I’m saying is our focus is on the political process,” Kirby told reporters.
Continued....
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