A Biblical land and its people are being wiped out by weapons of the twenty-first century. Syria, after almost five years of war, is strewn with the rubble of a shattered state, a fractured society, and a demolished landscape. To the north, the grand city of Aleppo—the formerly bustling heart of commerce, often likened to New York but dating back at least five millennia—is now compared to Stalingrad, because of its devastation. To the east, the Roman ruins in Palmyra, including the majestic Temple of Bel, from the first century, and the towering Arch of Triumph, from the second, have been pulverized.
Almost fourteen million Syrians can no longer feed themselves. At least half have no income. Electricity and water in most places are sporadic at best. So many hospitals have been destroyed, so little medicine is available, that health care is now “catastrophic,” the World Bank reported in September. Sixty per cent of the country’s twenty-two million people have fled their homes; many have fled the country altogether. Some seventy-five per cent of Syrians now live in poverty, and more than half are unable to access basic necessities, according to the United Nations. One in five Syrians face starvation and malnutrition.
A whole generation is being lost, UNICEF reports. More than three million children are not in school. Some fourteen thousand schools have been damaged, destroyed, or occupied, World Vision reported this month. A quarter of the country’s educational institutions were not functioning in 2014, the World Bank said.
“Syria has been irrevocably changed,” a senior U.S. official told me. Joshua Landis, a Middle East expert at the University of Oklahoma, put it differently: “Syria is becoming a black hole.”
The culprits are not just jihadi zealots running a murderous pseudo-caliphate in Raqqa or the autocracy of President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has used chemical weapons against its own citizens. Syria’s crisis is far more complex. The conflict—which began with graffiti protests by middle-schoolers and devolved into an all-out civil war—has spawned hundreds of militias. Some control no more than a neighborhood, but the culture of warlordism has become pervasive. The economy has been consumed by smuggling, piracy, black markets, and corrupted aid.
Since the recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt’s Sinai, the West, obsessed with the Islamic State, has been in a diplomatic frenzy to coördinate strategy. French President François Hollande was in Washington on Tuesday, and is visiting his Russian, British, German, Chinese, Italian, and Canadian counterparts to urge them to “unite our forces” in a “wide and single” coalition. “We need a joint response,” he said at a press conference with President Obama.
Obama is on board—rhetorically, anyway. “This barbaric terrorist group—ISIL, or Daesh—and its murderous ideology pose a serious threat to all of us,” he said, as he stood alongside Hollande. “It cannot be tolerated. It must be destroyed. And we must do it together.”
Those pronouncements overlook a more basic question: Can anything be done to save Syria from itself? Modern Syria has always been a fractious place. After independence from France, following the Second World War, the country went through twenty coups in twenty-one years—some successful, some not—until Hafez al-Assad, a former Air Force general, seized power, in 1970. He was initially embraced, at home and abroad.
“Admirers of General Assad welcome his seizure of power within the ruling Baath Party as the predictable victory of pragmatism over ideology,” the Times reported, shortly after Assad took office. Even today, the C.I.A.’s World Factbook notes that Assad “seized power in a bloodless coup and brought political stability to the country.” His rule “began with an immediate and considerable advantage,” the late British analyst Patrick Seale wrote, in 1990. “The government he displaced was so detested that any alternative came as a relief.”
Assad emerged out of Syria’s divisions, and he was merciless in suppressing them in order to hold the country together under his authority. His forces slaughtered thousands—some reports say tens of thousands—to crush the Hama uprising, in 1982. From Beirut that year, I reported on a coup plot led by Air Force officers. The Assad regime denounced the report—and the existence of a plot—as “utter nonsense,” but I immediately received two anonymous death threats, and a suitcase bomb was left in front of my apartment. The coup planners, within Assad’s own military, were reportedly executed. His prisons were perpetually filled with other dissidents and the disloyal.
After Assad’s death, in 2000, his son Bashar inherited the Presidency. The dynasty has now held power for almost a half century. Its longevity has created the impression that Syria—roughly fifty per cent larger than Pennsylvania—is a muscular country. It certainly has a prime location—bordering Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean. Neither peace nor war has ever had a chance in the Middle East without Syria’s participation. And it has powerful allies in Russia and Iran.
Syrians like to argue that a strong sense of nationalism has emerged over the past century. But Syria has many nationalisms, and they compete with one another. Although the majority of Syrians are Muslim, they are of diverse sects and ethnicities that have never rallied around a single party or leader. More than thirty per cent of the people belong to ethnic or religious minorities. Ten per cent are Christians. (I’ve been in Damascus for Easter, when shops were decorated with chocolate bunnies and colored eggs.) The lack of cohesion—or sense of common destiny—is one of many reasons that no Syrian opposition leader has emerged as a feasible alternative to Assad over the past five years. “There is no national identity,” the U.S. official told me. “And we can’t build a national identity for them.”
Meanwhile, the destruction mounts, thanks to the weaponry of the Assad government, an array of jihadi extremists, and more than a thousand militias, not to mention escalating foreign air strikes. Last year, I watched from a hillside overlooking the town of Kobani, on the Turkish border, as American warplanes dumped tens of millions of dollars of bombs to support a Kurdish militia fighting ISIS. The Kurds took the town back in January. It was the Islamic State’s first big defeat in Syria. But Kobani was left in ruins. Today, it still doesn’t have electricity; its economy is dead. The price tag just to rebuild the town is estimated at six billion dollars, the Washington Post reported this month. Many of its forty thousand residents, now refugees elsewhere, refuse to return.
“How territory is liberated will be important,” the U.S. official said. “If a lot of lead is dropped, it will have an enormous impact on what it takes to rebuild.”
“Syria has broken down,” Obama acknowledged at the press conference with Hollande. It began to break down, he said, the moment Assad’s forces started indiscriminately killing protesters during the Arab Spring, in 2011. Ending the war and rebuilding—and then sustaining—a new Syrian state will be “a difficult, long, methodical process,” he said. “But it’s possible.”
Is it? There is no clear end to the fighting in sight, and estimates of the cost of national reconstruction are already nearing three hundred billion dollars—roughly eight times what the United States committed to help reconstruct Iraq. Even if that money is spent, the larger question remains: Can a population so divided ever forge a stable political system that doesn’t entail a dictatorship? Beware.
