Syrians Desperate to Escape What U.N. Calls ‘Extermination’ by Government

Anne Barnard, The New York Times

08 February 2016

Image: Rajaa al-Dik, right, with her children Musa, 5, and Raghad, 9, Monday at a hospital in Kilis, Turkey. Both children were injured when their house’s roof collapsed after being hit by what locals called a Russian airstrike, in Minakh, Syria, last Friday. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

KILIS, Turkey — Tens of thousands of Syrians who were running for their lives piled up near the border crossing with Turkey here on Monday. They were fleeing a crushing wave of Russian airstrikes and government ground forces advancing toward the frontier in a developing rout of insurgent forces north of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

The intense and, critics say, indiscriminate Russian air attacks have shattered the latest round of peace talks, forced the regional and global players to reassess their strategies and calculations and left Syrian insurgents shocked that the United States and other countries that have supported them appear unable or unwilling to reverse the battlefield momentum.

And the potentially decisive turn in Syria’s nearly five-year civil war comes against the backdrop of a deepening humanitarian crisis that was reinforced on Monday by a United Nations report that accused Damascus of “inhuman actions” against Syrian civilians on a scale that “amounts to extermination.”

Syrians fleeing Aleppo arrived at the Turkish border-crossing gate in northern Syria on Saturday. A United Nations report found that the Syrian government had mounted a “systematic and widespread attack” on civilians. CreditBulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

Coordinated ground advances by Syrian government forces and allied militias such as the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have cut off one of two supply routes from Aleppo to the Turkish border and are threatening to close the other. Caught in the middle are dozens of rebel-held villages, trapped between the Islamic State, the government advance, Kurdish militias and the Turkish border.

“Just forgive us in case we don’t see each other again,” Aisha al-Dik, 60, one of those trapped in Syria, said in a voice message to her nephew Osama, who was in the border town of Kilis. Osama was at a hospital with some relatives who had been allowed into Turkey, but only because of critical injuries, including two children with skull fractures.

Throughout the conflict, the Western powers have found themselves constrained by conflicting aims and allegiances. On Monday, as international pressure mounted on Turkey to allow the refugees in, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was in Ankara pressing the Turks to prevent the two million Syrians already in the country from leaving to join the flow of refugees to Europe.

Speaking after her meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ms. Merkel said she was “not just appalled, but horrified” by the events in and around Aleppo.

For their part, the Turks were refusing to open their border, in part, analysts said, to pressure the United States to finally grant their longstanding wish of establishing a buffer zone inside Syria where civilians would be safe from Syrian government and Russian airstrikes.

Washington said last summer that it would work with Turkey to build what it called an “Islamic State-free zone,” in the same area that is now being squeezed. But the plans never materialized, and since then, Russia’s intervention makes the notion of a no-fly zone over any part of Syria that much trickier.

Events were moving so quickly on the ground that some Syrian insurgents, activists and civilians opposed to the government were beginning to speak of defeat, at least in Aleppo Province.

Running through it all was a sense of incredulity. The few Syrians who had made it to Turkey — because of their critical injuries — expressed shock that the United States, which has called for the removal of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was not responding more concertedly, either militarily or diplomatically.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have floated the idea of sending in ground troops, but to date there appear to be few concrete plans for an intervention in the near future.

“There is no hope,” said Afaf al-Dik, 13, who was evacuated from one of the cutoff villages, Minakh, after the roof of her house fell on her and her family when it was hit in what locals said were Russian airstrikes last Friday.

She was lying in a hospital bed in Kilis. In a nearby room, her younger brother and sister were unconscious, both with skull fractures, watched over by their mother, who is eight months pregnant, with bruises all over her back and belly.

The father of the family, Mahmoud al-Dik, a farmer, winced as he sat up in his hospital bed and delivered a concise summary of what most Syrians in the area were saying on Monday.

Syrians trying to cross into Turkey. CreditBunyamin Aygun/Associated Press

 

“Obama has been saying every day that Bashar al-Assad is finished,” he said. “But we are the ones who are being finished, not Bashar al-Assad. The American politicians lost their credibility. No one will believe them anymore.”

He found himself bewildered that Secretary of State John Kerry had declared that aid should be delivered to besieged Syrians immediately, with no significant results on the ground. He said, “This is the foreign minister of the United States!”

While some of those awaiting relatives stuck on the other side declared that the only explanation was the United States was at war with Muslims, Mr. Dik attributed it to electoral politics.

“Obama wants to say, ‘I started no fights, I kept us out of war.’ This preserves his party, while people are dying.”

As tens of thousands fled to the country’s border, a United Nation report said the government’s actions have amounted to “extermination.”CreditBulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

While he was speaking, his cousin Osama al-Dik received the voice message from their aunt, telling him to “Say hi to everyone” and pass on, just in case, her final farewell. She concluded, “It is war and our situation is miserable.”

Upon hearing it, Osama al-Dik insisted on delivering his own message to “the American administration, both Republicans and Democrats.”

“Stop the lies and hypocrisy. Stop lying to the poor and the weak,” he said. “That’s all.”

Things were no better for some of the thousands of Syrians still trying to make their way to Europe despite the cold and rough seas of a Mediterranean winter. On Monday, 22 more migrants drowned after a boat capsized off the Aegean coast close to Balikesir Province, a Turkish coast guard official said.

Turkish officials have been insisting that their country still has an open border policy, but at the same time declared that they would allow the new Syrians in only “if necessary,” as Mr. Erdogan put it Monday.

The wrangling was juxtaposed uneasily with the release of a report by the four-member United Nations Commission of Inquiry, which diplomats view as an authoritative record of human rights developments in Syria, saying that the government of Mr. Assad had mounted a “systematic and widespread attack” on civilians.

The panel cited the arrests of tens of thousands of people who had been sent to interrogation centers and prisons, where many were tortured to death or left to die of their injuries, as part of a broader campaign of “murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts.”

Human Rights Watch, in a separate report, accused Russia and Syria of using cluster bombs that have killed 37 civilians since Jan. 26.

Officials in Kilis said over the weekend that the displaced could be cared for with aid deliveries inside Syria, and some trucks went in carrying more tents on Monday afternoon. But that did little for the fears of encroaching airstrikes and violence. A camp for internally displaced people was bombed last week in Latakia Province.

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