First they faced Assad and the Islamic State. Now Syrian civilians cope with U.S. bombs

http://www.washingtonpost.com/first-they-faced-assad-and-the-islamic-state-now-syrian-civilians-cope-with-us-bombs/2014/09/23/cff0be24-a445-445c-bd9e-08fbb2a85c36_story.html?wprss=rss_world

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Airstrikes conducted by the United States and a coalition of Arab allies in Syria have opened a new phase in the country's brutal three-year civil war. The attacks, which included Tomahawk missiles and aerial bombardment, targeted the extremist Islamic State and an affiliate of al-Qaeda. It's likely that the international offensive against the jihadists will continue for weeks to come.

U.S. officials said Tuesday that they had no reports of civilian casualties or collateral damage as a result of their strikes on 22 different locations. Other reports from Syrian activists, though, suggest that at least 11 civilians, including four children, perished in a coalition strike in Idlib province.

Members of Syrian civil society groups overseas are concerned. "If we look at the history, there is always collateral damage when you hit populated areas from the skies," said Zaher Sahloul of the Syrian American Medical Society, which has provided medical relief to civilians in the midst of the Syrian conflict.

Whereas the Islamic State's positions targeted by U.S. warplanes in Iraq have been largely out in the open, the situation in Syria — where the U.S. seeks to hit key command centers and degrade the organization's strategic capabilities — is dramatically different. "During the last week, they’ve been redeploying in Raqqa," said Rim Turkmani, president of the London-based Syrian Civil Coalition, referring to the city in Syria that has been at the heart of the Islamic State's operations. Observers fear that they're deliberately putting civilians in harm's way.

"Based on what we've seen from airstrikes by the Syrian regime, [the Islamic State] is putting civilians into areas that are next to key buildings of the [the Islamic State] government. [The Islamic State] is also beginning to disperse itself and its military hardware into civilian areas," Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Dubai think tank INEGMA, told the news site Syria Deeply.

"[The Islamic State] has shown there is no limit to its brutality," Sahloul said. "They will do whatever they think is necessary to stop the campaign; I wouldn’t be surprised if they use civilians as human shields."

In its wars over the past decade, even when combating a set of militants less ruthless than the Islamic State, the U.S. has had a track record of accidentally killing civilians. Wedding parties in Afghanistan and Yemen have been hit. In the first phase of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. offensive may have claimed the lives of more than 6,600 Iraqi civilians, according to the monitor Iraq Body Count. Here's an excerpt from a report by the group in 2012:

On a per-day basis, the highest intensity of civilian killings over a sustained period occurred during the first three "Shock and Awe" weeks of the 2003 invasion, when civilian deaths averaged 317 per day and totalled over 6,640 by April 9th, nearly all attributable to US-led coalition-forces, reaching 7,286 by the time of President GW Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech of 1st May 2003.

So, no matter how careful and laser-precise the U.S.-led bombing campaign is, it's likely to have adverse effects for the civilians caught in the middle. "Definitely, the humanitarian solution will get worse before it gets better," Sahloul said.

The Syrian civil war has led to the deaths of some 200,000 people and the displacement of roughly a quarter of the country's population. A report by a commission appointed by the United Nations found almost all the combatants -- the Assad regime, the Islamic State and other rebel militias -- potentially guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including carrying out attacks in urban areas that constituted collective punishment of civilians.

Sahloul's organization is part of a coalition of more than 40 NGOs and humanitarian and civil society groups, both international and regional, that have signed on to a plea to the international community, urging that it does everything in its power to stop the indiscriminate violence of the Syrian civil war. The #WithSyria campaign released a moving video (above) this month as part of their effort.

Observers stress the need to maintain humanitarian access to the local population even as the U.S. raises the heat in Syria. After all, in a region marked by intractable insurgencies, there are few precedents for the success of air power alone.

"The international coalition that's bombing Syria should put all their political weight to end the Syrian conflict," said Turkmani. "There’s no military solution to this crisis."