By ANNE BARNARD MARCH 17, 2014
The New York Times
BEIRUT — Day after day, the Syrian civil war has ground down a cultural and political center of the Middle East, turning it into a stage for disaster and cruelty on a nearly incomprehensible scale. Families are brutalized by their government and by jihadists claiming to be their saviors as nearly half of Syrians — many of them children — have been driven from their homes.
At the start of the fourth year since Syrians rose up in a peaceful movement that turned to arms after violent repression, a snapshot of the country presents the harsh truth that Syria’s descent is only accelerating, with nothing to check it.
The government bombards neighborhoods with explosive barrels, missiles, heavy artillery and, the United States says, chemical weapons, then it sends in its allies in Hezbollah and other militias to wage street warfare. It jails and tortures peaceful activists, and uses starvation as a weapon, blockading opposition areas where trapped children shrivel and die.
Continue reading the main story Related Coverage video Video: The Syrian Opposition, ExplainedFEB. 7, 2014 The opposition is now functionally dominated by foreign-led jihadists who commit their own abuses in the name of their extremist ideology, just last week shooting a 7-year-old boy for what they claimed was apostasy. And some of those fighters, too, have targeted civilians and used siege tactics.
In Syria, 700,000 homes are damaged or destroyed. Above, a road in Deir Ezzor in January. Credit Ahmad Aboud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It is not as if the world has no evidence of Syria’s ordeal, which has killed an estimated 150,000 people. Syrians have issued a sustained, collective cry for help from what is now probably history’s most-documented manmade disaster. They capture appalling suffering on video and beam the images out to the world: skeletal infants, body parts pulled from the rubble of homes, faces stretched by despair, over and over.
Despite that, to the bitterness of Syrians, the world’s diplomatic attention is drifting. Even as Syria’s epic suffering is remaking the human geography of the Middle East and beyond, initiatives to ease the crisis have sputtered and failed to offer effective help. Already tenuous hopes for an internationally brokered peace settlement have further faded as Russian-American relations worsen.
António Guterres, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said that is in part because there is no obvious path to a coherent global response. Given the world’s growing unpredictability, and competing priorities, “crises are multiplying and more and more difficult to solve,” he said. “Afghanistan is not finished. Somalia is not finished. It’s overwhelming.”
All the while, Syria is falling apart.
Last weekend, another vital center of opposition life — the city of Yabrud, near the Lebanese border — fell to pro-government forces. As each such haven has been shattered, like Homs and Qusayr, it has become a watchword for civilian suffering, and more are displaced.
The country is threatened with de facto partition among the government, Kurdish militias and a patchwork of insurgent groups, some seeking to impose extremist Islamist rule. Criminal gangs profit from chaos, and pro-government militias increasingly threaten to slip from state control. A regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran further polarizes the conflict and fuels its sectarian dimension.
Adding to the urgency is the growing scale of regional destabilization. With nine million Syrians driven from their homes, according to the United Nations, 2.5 million of them into nearby countries, the Syrian displacement dwarfs the exodus from British-mandate Palestine during the war over Israel’s founding in 1948, a flight of 750,000 people that fuels conflict and hardship to this day.
“It’s not just a humanitarian issue, a need to feed people,” Dr. Fouad M. Fouad, a Syrian doctor who studies the impact of the conflict, told a conference at the American University of Beirut last week. “It’s a historical, geopolitical issue.”
Aid workers are scrambling to refocus public attention on Syria. Most urgent is ending the conflict, they say; all else at best mitigates the disaster. At the same time, they fear that governments — including the United States, the United Nations’ largest donor — could lose interest in financing the organization’s largest aid appeal in history, $4.4 billion for Syria in 2013 alone.
Private donations for Syrians have lagged far behind those for other emergencies, like the recent typhoon in the Philippines, international aid groups say.
Yet on Syria’s borders, no one can miss the flood of refugees, or the inadequacy of the international response. The crisis is spreading disease, upending neighboring economies and creating a “lost generation” of Syrian children, who before the war almost universally attended elementary school. Now fewer than half are in school; among refugees in neighboring Lebanon, the figure is 12 percent.
Analysts say that 42 percent of all Syrians, more than New York City’s population, have fled their homes. An equivalent catastrophe in the United States would mean 131 million Americans on the move.
In Lebanon, an unstable country smaller than Connecticut, the United Nations has documented 962,000 Syrians registered for aid or awaiting registration. Lebanon hosts more refugees per capita than any country since famine-stricken Ethiopians flooded Somalia 34 years ago.
Just as staggering is the transformation of life inside Syria, previously what is known in development parlance as a “middle-income country,” with functioning services and a sizeable middle class by regional standards.
Now, about 700,000 homes are damaged or destroyed, railways idle, factories closed. The Damascus-based Syrian Center for Policy Research puts unemployment at 50 percent. With half of Syria’s hospitals destroyed, thousands have died from preventable causes.
Several hundred, at least, have died of malnutrition-related causes. The Syrian refugee crisis, meanwhile, has not peaked. Unicef says 5.5 million children need aid, a number that has more than doubled in a year. Child refugees quintupled to 1.2 million, 425,000 of them younger than 5, and one in five Syrian girls in Jordan is forced into early marriage. Unable to pay for medical care abroad, Syrians routinely venture back to the war zone to give birth, have surgery or get cancer treatment.
The majority of Syrian refugees surveyed by the aid group Oxfam say they never expect to go home, a measure of their despair, and of the likelihood that their displacement is permanent.
Syria’s collapse has other effects. Poor Lebanese suffer from the loss of affordable medicines and health care they once got by crossing into Syria. Regional trade is gutted. In Jordan, increased water usage is depleting the supply, according to Mercy Corps, as the Zaatari refugee camp has grown into the world’s second-largest.
Last week in Shatila, an impoverished Beirut district now brimming with Syrians, Inas, 16, groaned as a neighbor slung her over her shoulder like a sack and carried her upstairs. Burned over 40 percent of her body when a shell struck her home in northern Syria, Inas cannot walk or bend. Treatment is not fully covered by United Nations refugee benefits, and she has spent weeks on journeys from hospital to hospital seeking an affordable discount.
She displayed her scaly, swollen feet, weeping as she recalled telling her fiancé, “Forget me, I don’t want you to marry me out of sympathy.”
The woman who carried her, Umm Joumaa, 37, had lost her four youngest daughters to shelling. Three survived, scarred, like Inas, with painful burns.
“Rather than throw myself from a window,” the mother said, “I should raise those beautiful girls.”
Mohammad Ghannam contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 3 Years of Strife and Cruelty Put Syria in Free Fall.
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