As the three-year old conflict in Syria continues to worsen and spread into neighboring states, international peace-making efforts have taken on added urgency as post-occupation dynamics in Iraq unravel and threaten a new regional conflagration. On January 12, the Friends of Syria — a coalition of Western and Gulf Arab states plus Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan — met in Paris ahead of the planned Geneva II international meeting (which actually will take place in the lakeside town of Montreux because a luxury watch fair has resulted in a lack of hotel space in Geneva itself). The Friends of Syria reiterated the importance of finding a political solution at the peace talks, which remains mired in uncertainty over which (and how many) representatives of Syria’s fractured opposition will attend.
In the midst of the two political set-pieces, an important humanitarian conference took place in Kuwait City on January 15. Nearly a year after Kuwait hosted an initial fundraising summit that resulted in more than US$1.6 billion in pledges from 43 countries, the second UN-sponsored meeting took place against the backdrop of a humanitarian crisis far worse in scope and scale. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon noted sombrely that more than 60,000 people had died in Syria since the January 30, 2013 Kuwait meeting while the number of Syrian refugees had risen from 700,000 to over three million. Nearly a quarter of a million people are trapped in besieged towns and communities face imminent starvation as siege has become a weapon of war, while civilians have borne the brunt of the brutalising tactics of the Assad regime and extremist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Opening the donor meeting, Ban Ki-Moon asserted that the United Nations would require $6.5 billion in humanitarian aid for Syria in 2014. The pledges in Kuwait II fell far short of this as they amounted to $2.6 billion, led by an announcement of $500 million from the Emir of Kuwait, $380 million from US Secretary of State John Kerry, and $160 million from the United Kingdom. Yet even this total will be beset by increasing difficulties in disbursing the aid owing to shifting military boundaries and greater wariness among Western donors over the nature and viability of opposition factions. Moreover, while humanitarian aid undoubtedly saves lives it cannot by itself resolve conflict, and attention now shifts to ensuring that Geneva II launches a political pathway that eventually brings an end to Syria’s spiralling violence.
A further difficulty facing the international community is the complexity of regional involvement in Syria’s civil war. Quite apart from the alarming spread of sectarian violence to Lebanon and Iraq, private financial flows from the Arab Gulf states have operated in parallel to, and largely independent from, official channels of state assistance and multilateral support. For instance, the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development have decades-long records of sustained humanitarian engagement in the Arab and Islamic world, as does the International Islamic Charitable Organization, founded in Kuwait in 1986. Although these organizations have developed well-earned reputations as leading regional humanitarian actors, their efforts are diluted by the upsurge in private unregulated flows from individuals and organizations in Kuwait and other Gulf States, flowing to myriad bands of rebels either directly or through proxies in third-party countries such as Turkey.
Syria needs sustained humanitarian aid and long-term international assistance. The terrible irony is that a country that until 2011 was one of the largest recipients of displaced persons, initially from Palestine and latterly from Iraq, has turned into the single-biggest generator of new refugees. Its regional and sectarian dimensions mean that the Syrian uprising has morphed into one of the most significant humanitarian crises since the Second World War. While much media attention recently has focused on the geopolitical fault-lines that connect Syria’s violence to wider region-wide trends, the plight of individual women, men, and children displaced within Syria or living in camps beyond its borders shows no sign of ending. As Secretary Kerry stated in Kuwait, the humanitarian situation in Syria is “an outrage” but the violence only looks set to worsen as opposition groups turn on each other and radical trans-national elements feed off the resulting vacuum of authority and control. This is the task as the international community prepares to reconvene in Switzerland on January 22.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., is the Baker Institute fellow for Kuwait. His research examines the changing position of Persian Gulf states in the global order, as well as the emergence of longer-term, nonmilitary challenges to regional security. He is also a visiting fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an associate fellow at Chatham House in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter at @Dr_Ulrichsen.