The Syria Dilemma, edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel

A primer on humanitarian crisis in Syria and reasoning toward a solution

The Syria Dilemma, edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel

(An edited version of this piece can be found on the website of Teaching for Change(TfC). Follow the link to access TfC's incredible on-line bookstore.)

The Syrian civil war, and the collapse of the Syrian state, is the direct cause of the most severe ongoing humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world today. According to the United Nations, an estimated seven million Syrians are internally displaced, another approximately four million are refugees living in the neighboring countries of Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, and in even more distant countries in Asia and North Africa.

The total of refugee and displaced people is more than half of the pre-war Syrian population. Hunger is widespread and, in many instances, forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad will not allow relief agencies access to trapped Syrians.

In Iraq, fighting between the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS—a militant group that owes much of its dramatic growth to the collapse of the Syrian and Iraqi states) and various Iraqi and Kurdish military units and militias has created another 2 million homeless people. The death toll from the fighting in both Syria and Iraq, including civilians, is probably 300,000 or more.

Conflict in Syria began in early 2011 as civil resistance to 40 years of authoritarian control by the al-Assad family. The situation quickly deteriorated after nonviolent protest was met by escalating repression, mass detentions, disappearances, and military and police assaults on demonstrators. Rebels, both Muslim and secular, sought and received military assistance from outside sources, including Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia. By 2012, the conflict had become a full-blown civil war that divided the country into multiple areas variously controlled by the Assad regime, secular and/or moderate Muslim rebel groups, and more extreme militant and fundamentalist groups, most notably ISIS.

Today, the situation remains fluid and the humanitarian crisis grows seemingly unabated. Democracy activists and advocates for civilian relief continue to agitate for more effective and sustained outside intervention by the UN and western democracies, despite the insufficiency that has characterized attempts to intervene so far. Two long and inconclusive U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq add to the difficulties in both arriving at a full understanding of the factors contributing to the crisis in Syria and developing a comprehensive, effective and sustainable response.

But The Syria Dilemma, edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, argues that the world has a moral obligation to intervene in Syria and relieve the suffering. Through a series of essays from a wide variety of knowledgeable observers, the book looks carefully at the many variables that will impair or outright prevent effective humanitarian relief. To the editors’ credit, the book does not settle for easy or platitudinous answers. Contributors call for antithetical solutions, for military intervention or for no military intervention, at all; for including all parties in a massive multi-party negotiation acknowledging that no peace can be achieved without the full participation of those involved and their sponsors, while others argue for the exclusion of the Assad regime, of ISIS, of Russia and others, on the grounds that those parties are guilty of war crimes or, at least, of deliberately exacerbating conflict.

Providing a useful account of the tensions and contesting agendas that are at the root of conflict and chaos both in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, The Syria Dilemma is an important example of how to thoroughly investigate the type of moral challenge that confronts the world today without forcing a conclusion on readers (or allowing them to look away).

Many of the users of Teaching for Changes website and resources will be interested in the book for those reasons, and, even, in using it in their own classrooms. The Syria Dilemma will provide a serious challenge to students, and no easy answers. But that, after all, is both the challenge of a real education, and the challenge of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria.