Mick Hartley

Since we're on the subject of Syria as precursor to Ukraine – Bombed hospitals, crushed cities. What Syrians recognize in Ukraine.

Ismail Al Abdullah, like other Syrians living in opposition-held northern Syria, knows the drill: Scan the sky. Don’t drive on an open road. Avoid crowds. And never, ever, trust a Russian cease-fire.

“I wouldn’t wish Russian aggression on any person or anyplace in the world, because it is bloody, brutal, it aims to break your will to live, and it never stops,” Mr. Al Abdullah, a rescue worker with the White Helmets organization, says over WhatsApp.

“I am watching the Russians trying to besiege Kyiv in the same manner they besieged Aleppo, and Homs, repeating the bombings and massacres I witnessed,” he says. “It feels frustrating to see it happening all over again.”

On the 11th anniversary of Syria’s revolution, with no peace in sight there, the parallels with Ukraine are hard to avoid.

As the Russian war in Ukraine deepens, and Moscow intensifies its bombardment and aerial campaign against Ukrainian cities, Syrians and outside observers say that if Ukraine cannot repel the Russian invasion, clues to that country’s future may be found in Syria’s present.  

One image from Ukraine this week was familiar to most Syrians: a bombed-out maternity hospital in Mariupol.

“Russia’s strategy is always to target hospitals, public facilities, rescue workers, anything that gives life or sustainability for civilians,” says Mr. Al Abdullah, who has been displaced three times by the war in Syria. “Their true aim is to kill and destroy the will of the people and make them flee their homes.”

Most devastating, perhaps, is the tactic known as “double-tap” bombing, when warplanes bomb a site, wait for a crowd to gather and rescue teams to arrive, and then circle back to strike a second time for maximum casualties.

Most of the 240 White Helmet volunteers who have been killed fell victim to that trick, Syrians say.

Analysts say it is part of a brutal and efficient strategy to force local people to surrender or leave their homes without the need for house-to-house fighting.

“In terms of approach, the indiscriminate shelling of urban areas is absolutely one that we have seen in Syria and in Chechnya; there is continuity here,” says Tracey German, a professor of conflict and security at King’s College London….