Mick Hartley

Lina Khatib – Basking in adulation, how Assad is exploiting the earthquake. “The disaster has let the Syrian dictator erase evidence of the regime’s heinous crimes, while brazenly demanding funds for reconstruction”.

Bashar al-Assad is laughing. Four days after an earthquake devastated northwest Syria, President Assad and his wife Asma visited sites of destruction and survivors in regime-held Aleppo. This was Assad’s first public appearance after the natural disaster struck. He was not solemn. He was literally laughing.

Assad, 57, was filmed in a destroyed neighbourhood surrounded by cheering men as he shook their hands in the crowd. One man shouts that Aleppo is now no longer devastated because Assad is there. Assad laughs. The man asks for a selfie. The selfie of a laughing Assad is widely shared on social media. Assad and Asma, 47, then visit a hospital, where they exchange kisses with a crowd of women.

This is Syria’s Assad, the same dictator who has been butchering his people for more than a decade. Until the day of the earthquake, Assad’s air force — with Russian support — continued to bomb the opposition-held northwest, the area which was also worst hit by the natural disaster. Assad had always wanted the area destroyed, its people killed. The earthquake came and gave his deadly mission a tactical gain. His loyalists circulated online messages saying that divine intervention had saved Assad the cost of barrel bombs.

Since 2011, Assad’s regime has been inflicting atrocities on the Syrian people — rape, torture, chemical weapons, besiegement, starvation, mass bombings and destruction of civilian settlements are just part of the catalogue. In 2012, President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a red line. Assad crossed that line the next year in Ghouta with no serious consequences. So he crossed it again in Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and in Douma in 2018. By 2022, 6.7 million Syrians were internally displaced and another 6.8 million were refugees. The West expressed support for the UN-led political process, but did not develop a comprehensive strategy for Syria.

Instead, as Obama sat on his hands, Putin was given the green light and saw his chance.

In the earthquake, however, Assad spied an opportunity: to achieve de facto recognition after years of political isolation. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the office of the presidency did not send condolences to the Syrian people or declare a state of emergency. Instead, prioritising the presentation of Assad as having international legitimacy, it highlighted all the messages Assad received from world leaders, many of them from Arab nations, expressing sympathy. There was special attention given to condolences from key ally President Putin….

Assad wants to use earthquake destruction as a ploy to acquire western funding for reconstruction. But it gets more sinister. The earthquakes give Assad a way to erase the evidence of regime crimes. He can claim that the wide-scale destruction inflicted by regime bombing was all an act of God.

Assad has pursued a scorched earth strategy against his opponents, often aiming to raze areas outside of his control to the ground. Russia’s military support in 2015 allowed his regime to bomb Aleppo into submission and retake it from rebels. After the earthquakes, Assad’s bulldozers took advantage of the destruction to demolish more buildings in the city while pretending the damage was due to the natural disaster.

The number of earthquake casualties in regime areas published by the ministry of health is more than four times that counted by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent civil society organisation. Assad has a documented history of torturing and killing political prisoners. The inflated death toll allows him to count torture victims as earthquake victims.

Pushing for de facto normalisation, regime and Russian channels are repeating the claim that the West must lift sanctions on Syria to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and that foreign aid should be delivered through regime-held Damascus.

In the week after the quake, two US members of Congress argued against the US treasury department’s decision to suspend sanctions on Syria for six months, for transactions related to earthquake relief, saying this paves the way for normalising relations with Assad….

In many ways, Russia used the Syrian conflict as a rehearsal for its invasion of Ukraine, utilising similar military and propaganda tactics. And the military co-operation between Iran and Russia that was nurtured in Syria is now being used against Ukraine.

The West must acknowledge that Assad right now is not laughing alone; Russia is still laughing with him in the background.

He thinks he is edging closer to scaling the hill of international isolation. But if the West is serious about holding Russia accountable for its actions in Ukraine, it cannot ignore the Syrian enabling factor. Putin and Assad are two faces of the same coin.