Red lines have been set and crossed, inquiries have been conducted and talks have been attempted, and yet the conflict in Syria continues to devastate the lives of its population. In what can only be described as one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, more than 200,000 have died and 12.2 million are now in desperate need of aid.

The levels of suffering are unimaginable and yet the international community seems to be standing by. Over four years since the conflict in Syria began, we will be asking if there is any sign of light at the end of the tunnel.

We will be reflecting on the decisions that have been made and how they have contributed to the current state of affairs in Syria. With that understanding, we will look at the situation in the country today and how developments could be made.

Chaired by Owen Bennett-Jones, freelance journalist and host of Newshour on the BBC World Service. As a correspondent with the BBC he has reported from over 60 countries. He is author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm and his first novel Target Britain.

The panel:

Jonathan Littell is a novelist and journalist. He is the author of Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising, documenting his time in Hom in 2012. His novel The Kindly Ones, originally published in French as Les Bienveillantes, became a bestseller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française’s Prix de Littérature. Previously he worked for a humanitarian agency, Action Contre La Faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Orwa Nyrabia is a Syrian film producer and activist. Born in 1977, raised in Homs, he lived in Damascus until the end of 2013. An actor by training, he worked as a journalist, and since 2005 has dedicated most of his time to documentary, producing the award-winning Silvered Water and Return to Homs. As an activist, he was a board member of the Syrian revolution’s leading constellation, Local Coordination Committees (LCC), served as LCC’s head of humanitarian aid and is associated with the Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian independent human rights organisation.

Laila Alodaat is a Syrian human rights lawyer specialising in international law of armed conflicts. She is also a trainer of international humanitarian law and has worked on several conflict situations including Syria, Libya, Iraq and Pakistan. She currently works on the MENA agenda programme at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and is also the Chair person of Syria Justice and Accountability Centre and a board member of Badael, a Syrian organisation working to promote non-violence.

Nerma Jelacic is a former journalist who has spent the last 15 years working on war crimes and criminal justice issues in conflict and post-conflict countries. From 2008 to 2014 she worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia before joining the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an organisation investigating and documenting atrocities in Syria which has already resulted in the completion of three trial-ready case-files.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Photo: Ayman Oghanna. ALEPPO, August 3rd 2012. In areas liberated by the Free Syrian Army, protestors took to Aleppo’s streets to demonstrate against the Assad regime, following Friday prayers.

Return to Homs follows two close friends and young revolutionaries as their beloved city is taken over by the army. Basset is a local football star, the goalkeeper for the Syrian national team who also became an iconic singer in the revolution, and Ossama is a media activist and pacifist.

The intimate portrait shows how they transform from peaceful protestors by August 2011 into rebel insurgents in August 2013 as Homs is turned into a bombed-out ghost town. The film directed by Talal Derki was previewed at the Frontline Club on Friday 13 June and a Q&A with producer Orwa Nyrabia via Skype followed.

Nyrabia started by explaining that he wanted to find the right production strategy and position the film in the right way from the start:

“For the way that really fits its nature . . . we [wanted] people to follow our protagonists and not only to watch from a distance, with the alienation of distance as they watch on the news. Syria today, it’s a far away world between al-Qaeda and some lunatic dictator. . . . [We were] trying to get the world to connect to our reality rather than only to the stereotyped media image.”

An audience member asked how the local people had been affected by the conflict in Syria and how it had radicalised them.

“The world media did not manage to accept the boring news of a peaceful revolution and really were calling on all the rebels for sexier news. . . . A lot of the media pressure that was taking place was being initiated towards Syria asking where is al-Qaeda because the news was boring. And in that sense what happened was disastrous because it was all about appropriation to al-Qaeda or whatever is a similar thing and it was all in supporting favour of Assad who claimed it was a sectarian revolt.”

“Syrians were left alone and we reach what happened yesterday and the day before in Iraq. We get the point where nobody wanted to give weapons to the Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian Army and any of its branches because the weapons might fall into the wrong hands. . . . When you stand aside and watch from afar . . . and try to count many Salafists are there and how many non-Salafists are there . . . today the wrong hands went for themselves and got the better weapons and now they will have their following because people need those weapons; . . . they will follow the people who have the weapons and who can arm people to protect themselves or to try to achieve whatever their schemes are or agenda is.”

Nyrabia said that he could understand why Basset was pushed so far away from his peaceful beginnings when pressured for such an extended amount of time:

“Of course after all this time in the siege, as much as any others in the siege he is definitely more radical than before. But who am I to judge someone, a human being . . . after all this pain . . . and really agonising experience. I am being radicalised in my European exile (or residency) so I cannot imagine how bad I would be if I was still in Syria.”

What about the role of Salafists in Syria? Another audience member asked.

“What’s happening now should be a big alarm to the world. This inaction, standing in silence saying lets leave them because we don’t understand al-Qaeda versus Assad. . . . There’s a total of 750 lines of subtitles in the film, something like 10,000 words. . . . Once in the film the word Salafist was mentioned. . . . It’s not a priority in the film, it’s a priority in the stereotype, in the prejudice. We had no Salafists until the end of the shooting of the film. . . . They were no more conservative or more radical but just our own local neighbourhood inhabitants. What’s been happening the past year to 18 months with a lot of anger from my side now is this major international investment in not doing anything and that is the best empowerment to both Assad and al-Qaeda.”

Return to Homs premiered as the opening film of the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam in November 2013; won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance Film Festival 2014 (among others) and will be released by Journeyman Pictures in Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK from Friday 27 June.
 

On February 19 at the Frontline Club, a panel chaired by international editor at Channel 4 News Lindsey Hilsum, discussed the current state of rebel fractions and the rise of ISIS in Syria.

Kim Sengupta, Lindsey Hilsum and Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi discuss Syria and ISIS at the Frontline Club

Hilsum started of by asking what happened to the FSA, which was so prominent during the first months of the Syrian rebellion?

Kim Sengupta, defence and diplomatic correspondent at The Independent said:

“There are more brigades, battalions that nominally at least will say that they belong to the FSA but as an organisation it is still very much based in Istanbul. It’s got probably more influence than before but not an awful lot on the ground.”

How did ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) rise to become one of the most prominent groups?

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University focusing on developments in Syria and Iraq:

“On the ground what happened was that Jabhat al-Nusra people accepted [leader of ISIS Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s argument [that al-Nusra was merely an extension of ISI and therefore should merge] and accordingly they switched over from Jabhat al-Nusra to declare themselves ISIS.”

Al-Tamimi explained the ideology of ISIS:

“Ultimately they [ISIS and al-Nusra] share the same ideological program. ISIS emphasises much more the goal of establishing a caliphate…Beginning in Iraq and Syria which then should not only encompass the entire Muslim world but the whole world, including London and such places… This globalist emphasis, which ISIS does, in contrast with al-Nusra, means that this appeals so much to foreign fighters.”

http://twitter.com/Alexwhi/status/436260104787484672

Raffaello Pantucci, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) said that many foreign fighters are unaware of the complicated environment they are going into:

“One of the things that isn’t so clear to individuals that seem to be going out there to fight is I think they miss the point about how confusing a battle field this really is and how shifting it really is. And how these allegiances on the ground are changing almost daily.

But why ISIS and not other groups?

Pantucci:

“…What’s worrying is that ISIS has a more globalist rhetoric… a lot of these people who are going out there are not going…because they want to become involved in terrorist activity and have any intention in coming back here to conduct some sort of terrorist attack… but what’s worrying is the groups they are joining and the people they will meet … may have different ideas and may be able to persuade them to have these different ideas.”

Lindsey Hilsum, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Malik Al-Abdeh discuss ISIS and Syria at the Frontline Club

Malik Al-Abdeh, a British-Syrian freelance journalist based between London and Antakya, attempted to simplify the confusing environment:

“If you go to these places you realise that it’s all about money, it’s about local power brokers. How else do you explain why al-Nusra and ISIS don’t like each other? They’re two gangs that don’t get along.”

@Alexwhi: #Syria is like wild west, and extremist Islamist #ISIS group brings order to areas it controls, @malikalabdeh says @frontlineclub

— Hammad (@hammadsarfraz) February 19, 2014

A question from the audience asked what should the west and other powers be doing?

Al-Tamimi:

“It’s all just become so fragmented now…I think that either you accept the idea of wanting a total victory and then you’ve got to have some kind of international force brought in in the aftermath, to train some kind of army to bring some kind of stability and that will take a very very long time…a timescale of decades…or are you going to go with a de facto partition of the country and some kind of ceasefire?”

Sengupta said that it is actually too late for the west to intervene; the time has passed:

“If you don’t want to support a population against a regime, don’t entice them to rise up which is what Britain and France, in particular did… have been doing consistently and then they have failed abjectly to support what was left of the so-called secular groups and moderate groups and thus we have seen the triumph of ISIS and other extremist groups.”

Pantucci:

“I think that there was a moment where the west could actually do something to affect a difference, I think that moment has passed quite a long time ago and I don’t know if there is a huge amount that they could actually control about this situation anymore.

“…I think the one plan that they’ve got is how do we mitigate the threat that’s going to come back to us. And that’s why … the focus here is on the foreign fighters.. I don’t think there’s a plan for an end state of how we want it to look. I think they want to make it as less bad as possible.”

Watch and listen to the full discussion below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/isis-and-the-battle-for-syria

The uprising in Syria began as a battle between Syrians and the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but the situation in the country now is much more complicated. With foreign fighters streaming in to join al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the conflict has entered a new phase.

As fighting between the Syrian opposition and al-Qaeda-affiliated groups intensifies, we will be bringing together a panel to offer a picture of what is happening on the ground in Syria. We will be looking at the groups involved, how they have developed, and their power and influence in the country and further afield.

With the conflict spilling into Iraq, we will be asking what the international community should be doing to prevent further expansion of groups such as ISIS in the region.

Chaired by Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Channel 4 News and author of Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.

The panel:

Raffaello Pantucci is a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI).

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and a Shillman-Ginsburg at the Middle East Forum. He focuses on developments in Syria and Iraq, particularly jihadist militant groups.

Kim Sengupta is the defence and diplomatic correspondent at The Independent.

Malik Al-Abdeh is a British-Syrian freelance journalist based between London and Antakya. He previously worked for the BBC and Reuters and was co-founder of Barada TV. He now reports from inside Syria and serves as a consultant on Syrian affairs for NGOs and media organisations.

Photography: Ayman Oghanna

ALEPPO, August 3rd 2012. In areas liberated by the Free Syrian Army, protestors took to Aleppo’s streets to demonstrate against the Assad regime, following Friday prayers.