President Trump’s team will not agree to “rebuild Syria” for dictator Bashar Assad and his Russian supporters, a top U.S. diplomat emphasized on the cusp of a major offensive by the Damascus regime.
“That would be absurd,” Ambassador Nikki Haley told the United Nations Security Council. “The U.S. taxpayer is certainly not going to subsidize Assad’s campaign of destruction.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has been lobbying for Western aid funding, while helping Assad prepare for an assault on the last territories held by the Free Syrian Army opposition groups and al Qaeda affiliates. A victory for the regime would theoretically put pressure on Western powers to help stabilize the country in order to avoid a resurgence of terrorism and mitigate a refugee crisis, but it would also mean rehabilitating Assad’s conquests.
“[T]hey want us to clean up all the roads, bridges, and homes that Russian jets, Iranian-backed militias, and Syrian shells destroyed,” Haley said at the meeting. “The United States will not consider such requests for reconstruction aid until we see concrete results from a genuine political process that ends the war and offers freedom to the Syrian people.”
President Trump, like then-President Barack Obama before him, has avoided attempting to overthrow Assad militarily. instead, U.S. forces focused chiefly on supporting Kurdish fighters against the Islamic State. U.S. troops are likewise holding a key border crossing in order to stop Iranian terror networks, which is also supporting Assad, from traveling freely through Iraq into southern Syria. But American officials hope that aid funding could provide the leverage to remove Assad, which western powers believe must happen in order to avoid another outbreak of war.
“It’s just reality: Syria, by World Bank estimates, [it will require] more than $200 billion to reconstruct Syria,” Brett McGurk, the U.S. official overseeing counter-Islamic State operations in the region, told reporters last year. “It’s probably many multiples of that. And the international community is not going to come to the aid of Syria until there is a credible political horizon that can lead to a credible political transition in Syria. That is the reality.”
Putin hopes that the western consensus on Assad will crack if the Syrian despot controls most of the country, because European nations are currently under social pressure from an influx of Syrian refugees.
“We must reinforce the humanitarian dimension of the Syrian conflict, and by that I mean boost humanitarian assistance to the Syrian population, and help the regions where refugees living abroad can return to,” Putin said in August. “This is potentially a huge burden for Europe.”
But Haley reiterated that an offensive against Idlib would endanger about 3 million civilians. “If they support an offensive in Idlib, the world will know where Russia really stands when it comes to supporting peace talks,” she said. “An offensive in Idlib will only leave Syria weaker and more broken and create generations of Syrians who will never forget the heinous and senseless brutality of the Assad regime and its allies.”
