Pictures and video of desperate Syrian refugees arriving in Europe – or dying in the attempt – have topped the global news agenda in the past week but there has been relatively little focus on the causes of the crisis and the voices of the refugees have gone largely unheard. Media coverage has tended to portray the crisis as a natural catastrophe or exaggerate the role of the Daesh militant group in its creation.
Increasingly, the conflict in Syria is being portrayed as one between the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Daesh militant group, with the former being portrayed as the lesser of two evils. The civil society organisations which still work on the ground overtly in areas held by moderate opposition forces and covertly in areas held by the Assad regime and Daesh, have been largely ignored by the media and the voices of refugees have not been heard.
Oqba Fayyad, a Syrian journalist from the town of Qusair in Homs Province says he was forced to flee his hometown in May 2013, just before it was overrun by Syrian regime forces and their Hezbollah allies. He says that in the month before it fell to the regime, hundreds of people in this town of 5,000 were killed in the regime’s aerial and ground attacks, which he says, included “barrel bombs, cluster bombs, and napalm… just before they stormed the town, they used vacuum bombs which can suck out the oxygen of any building, turning it into dust in seconds”. He had no choice but to flee.
He says “For three days, we travelled in the forests with no food or water, carrying the injured on our backs, with their wounds festering. We managed to reach the [opposition-held] towns in the Qalamoun area”. However, they did not receive a warm welcome there. The inhabitants had seen the brutality of the assault on Qusair and now feared that if they took in the refugees, a similar fate would befall them. Clashes broke out and they fled once again to Arsal in Lebanon where they were subjected to a harsh regime by the local authorities, including a curfew after 6 pm. He eventually managed to contact the Swedish consulate in Lebanon, and was able to gain asylum in Sweden.
However, Syrians are not only fleeing regime bombardment of opposition-held areas. Sometimes, when an area is captured by opposition forces, some of the inhabitants flee to areas still controlled by the regime. Usually they fear what the regime will do to the areas held by rebels, which includes bombardment similar to the one described by Fayyad or, in areas surrounded by regime controlled territory, prolonged sieges which lead to the starvation of inhabitants.
Mohamad Manla is a Syrian opposition activist who has been a refugee in Germany for nearly three years. He fled from the Salah al-Din area of Aleppo when it captured by rebels from Syrian regime forces in July 2012, to western Aleppo, which stayed in regime hands. Salah al-Din later became one of the most dangerous places in the world as the Syrian regime pounded it and other rebel-held areas of Aleppo with barrel bombs.
However, rather than finding safety in regime territory, whenever Manla went out, he was stopped at security checkpoints, and threatened by regime soldiers and agents who accused him of loyalty to the rebels, simply because his ID card said he was from an opposition-held area. Two months later, he fled once again, to Egypt, and from there to Germany.
At security checkpoints and government offices, people are often kidnapped or arrested arbitrarily. Another refugee from the opposition held northern Aleppo province, who preferred not to give his name, said that his 70 year old father was arrested when he went to collect his pension at a government office in western Aleppo. He was accused of being a member of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusrah and held in a 2 by 1.5 metre cell with six other prisoners and beaten. He was only released because a friend of the family had contacts in the security services.
Manla’s brother, a student at Aleppo University, has recently joined him in Germany after fleeing from Syria. A recently-passed law has made it compulsory for all students graduating from university to join the army. The possibility of conscription into the Syrian regime’s army is a major factor driving young men to flee the country. They are effectively faced with the choice of fighting and possibly dying for a regime many of them oppose or making a dangerous journey abroad.
Manla is clear on what he believes the solution to the conflict is, “A no-fly zone would empower the revolution once again. Schools and universities could be set up in opposition held areas which would prevent young people from being influenced both by the regime’s dictatorial ideology and Daesh’s extremist one. It will also allow the rebels to organise themselves to fight against Daesh and the regime.”
While proposals for a no-fly zone are controversial in the United States and Europe, with many politicians fearing involvement in a Middle Eastern war, there is a much wider acceptance of the idea among Syrians. The demand has been officially endorsed by Planet Syria, an umbrella group of more than 100 Syrian civil society organisations and the White Helmets, a civil defence organisation which mainly works to rescue survivors of regime barrel bomb strikes.
The Syrian government has a total monopoly on air power in the Syrian conflict. Air attacks were responsible for over 40% of the civilian deaths documented by the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC), a Syrian organisation which monitors civilian deaths and human rights abuses. The most commonly used aerial weapon is a barrel bomb. Barrel bombs are deadly, indiscriminate, and relentless. Over 11,000 of them have been dropped since the beginning of 2015 and Syrian activists point out that the regime has killed seven times more civilians than Daesh has since that date. They are, however, a very simple weapon – crude unguided barrels filled with TNT and scrap metal – but they are deadly, indiscriminate, and relentless.
While Western commentators have placed their own spin on the causes of the Syrian refugee crisis, with some blaming it on the extremism of Daesh and others warning of the dangers of intervention, a totally different picture of the crisis emerges from the stories of refugees and the data accumulated by Syrian organisations working on the ground. Western policy makers would do well to listen to what Syrians are saying about what is happening in their country and why they are leaving.
Amr Salahi is a British jounalist of Syrian origin. Follow him on twitter.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.