On Sunday, Syrian forces loyal to Bashar Assad launched artillery strikes on a hospital in the town of al Atareb. Vladimir Putin is directly responsible for the seven innocent people who were killed and 15 others who were wounded.
The hospital was run by the Syrian American Medical Society. It says that “among those killed in the attack was a 12-year-old orphan who came to the hospital to receive his routine vaccinations.” It adds that “the hospital’s coordinates had been shared with [United Nations] in order to deconflict and certify that it was a humanitarian facility.”
That deconfliction notification is critical. It means that the Russian military command in Syria was aware of the hospital’s location and activity. Considering that Russian intelligence officers are embedded with Syrian regime forces and that these forces seek guidance from the Russians before carrying out attacks on humanitarian targets, we can have high confidence that Russia bears direct culpability for this latest attack. Evincing as much, the Turkish foreign ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador, and the U.S. State Department has condemned the war crime.
Unfortunately, the complaints will accomplish nothing.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Putin’s favorite useful idiot and will kneel to his boss when pressured. But considering that many of its top foreign policy officials are Obama administration veterans, the Biden administration cannot seriously believe that its words alone will end these kinds of attacks. After all, as much as Ben Rhodes could never quite figure it out, the Russians have long enjoyed targeting hospitals and other humanitarian facilities in Syria. They see these attacks as a useful way to weaken rebel morale by massacring their families and a means to exert pressure on the international community to accept a ceasefire on terms weighted toward Putin and Assad’s interests.
Still, following investigations that have proved how the Russian air force has carried out similar attacks, the Russians now leave some of these strikes on humanitarian sites to Assad’s forces. This is preferable for the Russians in that it mitigates the risk of their Air Force being tracked taking off, specifically targeting hospitals, and then returning to base — something that has happened repeatedly. If a Russian intelligence officer embedded with Assad’s forces tells them to target a specific hospital but leaves the actual attack to the Syrians, the attack will occur with a lower risk of Russia’s role being detected.
The cost, however, is the same.
I spoke to Jomana Qaddour about the latest attack. Qaddour is the co-founder of the Syria Relief and Development group and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. She explained that “Our staff in northwest Syria always knew [the deconfliction channel] wouldn’t actually be a method to reduce bloodshed. They have resigned themselves to knowing that participating in the deconfliction mechanism would only be helpful for future accountability mechanisms to show evidence that the culprits had prior knowledge of the location being a hospital and not some terrorist bunker.”
Qaddour nailed it. This situation should be intolerable to a Biden administration that has promised to prioritize international humanitarian law. What the Russians are doing in Syria is far more bloody than what the Saudis did to Jamal Khashoggi. Both incidents are outrageous, of course. But if Biden was willing to act against an ally over Khashoggi’s brutal murder, he should be willing to act against an adversary over these brutal hospital attacks.
What should be done?
As with the Russian GRU’s February 2018 attack on U.S. military personnel in Syria, one proven way to enforce Russian compliance with deconfliction mechanisms is reciprocal military force. That said, this option should be reserved for attacks against American citizens or specific interests in Syria (I would argue that if any Americans were at the hospital in al Atareb, it would justify defensive retaliation). Alternatively, President Biden should impose greater sanctions pressure on Moscow and Assad. Sanctions would be especially effective if focused on both governments access to international financial markets. If the price tag for relinquishing these sanctions is a suspension of strikes against hospitals, Putin will pay it.
Regardless, the U.S. should not tolerate what Russia is doing.
