As Congress decides whether or not to bomb Syria, the voices of those who will be most affected by an American airstrike have received little attention. They’ve been lost amid the Sunday network hubbub about precision weapons, “pinprick strikes” and whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be assassinated.
As it stands, some 2 million Syrians have so far fled their war-ravaged country, according to the U.N., and another 4.2 million have been displaced within its borders. The U.N.’s refugee agency estimates that an average of 5,000 Syrians are fleeing the country every day. The war, now in its third year, has already claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Vocativ spoke with Syrian refugees about the possibility of an American attack on Assad. Many—though not all—were pessimistic about the future of their country in the aftermath of a U.S. airstrike.
Yasmine, a young woman from the coastal city of Tartus—a stronghold of the country’s embattled minority Alawite rulers—left Syria earlier this year with her husband in hopes of providing a better life for their young son. They’re now in Lebanon, but asked not to print their full name for fear of reprisals from both sides in this bloody war. ”I don’t see the point of this attack,” she says. “Everyone says the regime used chemical weapons, but no one really knows who did it.”
Many opponents of an American strike point to the bogus intelligence that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, attempting to draw parallels into the debate over Syria ”They say these strikes are punishment for Bashar [al-Assad], but the Syrian people will suffer, not him,” Yasmine, who doesn’t back the Assad regime, but is critical of the Islamist rebels, says. “Our taxes pay for the infrastructure of the country that will be destroyed even more than it already is. And what about the people that work in places that might be bombed? Most of them are just normal, hard-working Syrians.”
Yasmine adds that military service in Syria is compulsory for young men, meaning rank and file conscripts often have no choice but to serve. “It’s not a punishment for Bashar because if things get bad he can take his family to Russia or somewhere else that’s safe,” she says. “Only the Syrian people will lose.”
Syrian refugees line up to register for aid in Aarsal, a city in northern Lebanon.
A 27-year-old day laborer from Homs named Khaled, a Sunni who once sympathized with the opposition forces until his hometown was destroyed in 2012 and now works construction in Beirut, says he has never been politically active and rarely shares his opinions about the war in Syria with friends or family. But, he says, “This attack will be a huge mistake for America. Many Syrians will die, and the war could quickly spread to places like Lebanon, or Jordan or America’s friend Israel.”
There are also many Syrians who support a U.S.-led attack on Syria. Reached by phone in Homs, a rebel sympathizer who goes by the name Abdel Karim welcomed foreign airstrikes. “Let the Americans bomb that dog Bashar and his terrorists,” he says. “They have been bombing us with every weapon imaginable for years. God willing, this war will be over much quicker if America attacks Bashar.”
Several Syrians Vocativ approached in Beirut preferred to avoid any discussion of airstrikes out of fears for their safety or, in one case, because they’re simply tired of talking about it. “It can’t get any worse, can it?” one middle-aged man says. “The Americans are going to do whatever they want, so it doesn’t matter what I think,” says another.
There is some concern, similar to Khaled’s, that a U.S. attack on Syria will spread into a full-blown regional war because no one knows what Syria’s allies, namely the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its primary patron, Iran, will do. However, Israel has struck military targets inside Syria at least four times this year and Assad’s regime responded with only words.
Syrian families undergo security checks as they cross the border into Lebanon.
Hezbollah reportedly is on a higher state of alert following a car bombing last month in Beirut and the threat of airstrikes in Syria, where it has sent fighters to support the Assad regime. As the editor in chief of the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar wrote Wednesday: ”For a week now, the engines of the resistance axis have been running at full throttle, mobilizing thousands of strategic units from Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah to complete all that is necessary to confront an attack and wage an open-ended war.”
No one can be sure what foreign military action in Syria will look like. For now, countless scenarios are being played out everywhere from the Pentagon to tech blogs to Twitter. But the bottom line is, nobody knows.
For Yasmine and her family, however some things are certain: The Syrian war is no closer to a resolution, and countless more people are going to die.
“It’s hard for me, because when I see another country, the U.S. or anyone else, threatening to attack my country, it’s terrifying,” she says. “There is no future for my son in Syria. It’s no place for children anymore, and no one knows when or how this war will end. I never thought it would come to this.”
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