In Putin's net: humanitarian challenges in Syria

 

On Monday 6 February 2023 at 13.25 local time a disrupting earthquake of 7.8 magnitude devastated with twenty seismic shocks the regions of  central and eastern Turkey and the Syrian border. This has been, in the words of Erdogan, the worst humanitarian and natural catastrophy since 1939, when another quake invested the State, provoking 33000 dead and 100000 wounded people.

This time the tragedy spikes higher numbers: 34000 dead people are recorded so far, half a million people in need according to the WFP and 141000 rescue personnel digging into the rubble, especially the white helmets, working in 10 provinces and the Who warns a second disaster as cold winter sets in. Almost uncountable the homeless and the Internal Displaced people, especially in Syria where the aftermath of the earthquake add up to the IDPs of the civil war. Thus, the data are dreadly alarming.

What will happen thereafter is unlikely to be foreseen, both in Turkey where next June Erdogan will face the presidential elections, and much will be depending on the way he’ll succeeding in handling this crisis, and in Syria, internationally isolated  and enjoying the support just from Russia and Iran.

The scenario  is taking a bud turn for the humanitarian operations in this last country, as the main international organizations, UN and EU , other than the USA while releasing substantial financial aids to Turkey, are almost living Syrians to their destiny, being the country under severe sanctions.

Syria, in effect, fundamentally divided in three regions (the northwest occupied by the rebels, a northeast under the turkey influence and the rest of the country pro Assad regime) is coming from an history of twelve years of civil war against its sanguinary president  that is succeeded anyhow to exterminate Isis forces in its womb, although few sacks of terrorist groups still remain. The country  is living a deadlock now worsened by the earthquake. The external aids which have been provided are merely symbolic  and hard to reach civilians also being debated the points of entry of the humanitarian assistance, ( Balabab or Damasco) and it’s  internationally more and more left alone , having been kicked out also by the Arab League in 2011. In addition to that, on its territory it’s possible assisting to terrible fightings between international  influencers and allied, as the Israeli attacks against Iranian bases  on its lands.

Therefore a nation torn apart by a conflict both internally and externally, not exempted by terroristic attacks, fighting for supremacy aiming to share the area of influence in the Arab world and an economic and sanitary standoff arrived  to a collapse see a large array of civilians trapped in a no escape situation et find hard to survive, having to face with burocratical and political blocks to the arrival of humanitarian aids.Then the world keep on watching , powerless, the development of a humanitarian crisis with no precedents in which political decisions get there upper hand and in which have been given priority  on the humanitarian matter and the protection of human rights, relying just in Putin’s Russia, whose forces by the same way are at their lowest, and recently condemned by the international community as the perpetrator of crimes against humanity for the Ukraine vicissitudes. Thus in the near and the far east it’s crystal clear a degeneration of superpowers, as well as nationality of medium and small caliber that brings to collapse, entangled in a series of sanctions, that put at risk the possibility of profitable and optimistic diplomatic relations, plagued by the catastrophe of the war, by natural calamities and by an economic  dependence by the energetic factor.

Here we are, thus ,that if to the social and political elements we sum up unforeseenable factors, such as for example un earthquake of long range or other environmental disasters, these autoritarian regimes show off all their vulnerability and lack of capacity to raise themselves up from the bottom, not forgetting that the president Assad, although the urgence, launched a first call for help to the UN just the 13 February, leaving its population kept on being exterminated, remaining in the meshes and under the shadow of a complex intertwining of difficult and ambiguous relations on the International panorama.