If you want to make sense of Syria’s descent into civil war and the rise of Islamic State, National Geographic is airing one of the most powerful and comprehensive documentaries tonight at 9pm on DSTV channel 181, writes Shannon Ebrahim.
Film-maker Sebastian Junger and producing partner Nick Quested have pulled from nearly 1000 hours of chilling footage to narrate the story of how Syria became a killing field, and how IS emerged and morphed into a deadly force that continues to threaten the Western world today.
Many of us have watched the snippets of footage that have dominated global headlines over the past six years since the Syrian conflict began, but we have not been at pains to connect all the dots into a clear picture of what exactly happened and why.
When we see broadcasts of the sea of orange life jackets piled high across the shores of Greece, we at times forget what these desperate families are fleeing from, and how their lives were turned into hell on earth.
When I interviewed Junger and Quested this week, I asked them what their objective was in producing such a graphic and detail-specific documentary. Their answer was to explain events in the world in order to make ordinary people and their policy-makers more pragmatic and compassionate to the plight of others.
For Junger, the son of refugees, it was imperative to show the world how very good people can be easily caught up in war. Quested claimed that as a journalist he did not intend to tell people what to think, but what to think about. Running at the length of a feature film, everyone would benefit from learning about the trajectory of Syria’s war. The story begins with the series of protests in Daraa against the detention of young boys who had painted critical graffiti on the wall of their school.
The Head of Security for that area was Assad’s cousin Atef Najib, whose survival and that of the ruling family depended on the brutal crushing of any popular dissent in the wake of the domino effect of the Arab Spring.
Assad and his henchmen were all too well aware of the consequences of the popular uprisings against Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The regime knew that it could never have survived a genuine reform process, and they would have either been imprisoned or killed like the others deposed in the Arab Spring.
From the outset, their strategy was to eliminate any form of dissent through brute force. The strategy had worked for Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez in 1982, who wiped out any challenge to his regime through artillery and aerial bombardment, killing anywhere between 10000 and 40 000 people. This had kept the population cowed into submission until 2011.
The boys of Daraa suffered the most brutal torture, which led to protests by the local community against their continued incarceration. When the regime responded to the protesters with live ammunition, funerals were met with more carnage, the protests (which had merely been about justice for their sons,) morphed into broader demands for social justice.
The growing repression of the state, mass arrests, extreme torture and executions then led to calls for Assad to step down. For a regime that knew the consequences of allowing the masses to rise, their campaign of violence was merciless, and continues. It has to be an outright military victory for the regime if its leaders are to survive.
What the documentary brings out that is particularly interesting is the strategy of the Assad regime in terms of going after all the moderate opposition, but not actually targeting IS which emerged like a cancer within Syrian territory. The reason is made clear – for as long as bearded extremists roamed the country, Assad would look like the more palatable alternative, and the West would hesitate to pour in arms to the moderate opposition in order to avoid them falling into the hands of jihadis. The strategy worked.
The official narrative was born – the opposition were terrorists and foreign-funded fighters, who had to be crushed.
When the violence unleashed on the people became intolerable, officers of the Syrian army began defecting in order to protect the protesters, establishing the Free Syrian Army.
Initially it was successful in capturing military bases and liberating 70% of Aleppo, but the government intent was to reduce all opposition areas in Aleppo to rubble, and this it has done through indiscriminate aerial bombardment.
Many nations have contributed to the destruction of Syria and Iraq, now it is for the international community to take responsibility for the people whose lives have been destroyed.
* Shannon Ebrahim is Independent Media's Foreign Editor.