Why the Paris attacks are going to hasten the end of the four-year-old conflict
On the night of November 13, 2015, at about 9:20PM, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt near Gate D of the Stade de France, a large athletic stadium outside of Paris. The explosion took the life of the bomber as well as one victim.
Over the next 20 minutes, separate attacks were unleashed on 5 other locations throughout Paris: 4 restaurants and 1 concert hall. Three teams of terrorists carried out coordinated attacks throughout the city.
In all, 130 people died that night, and over 300 were injured. It was the deadliest act of terrorism against France in that nation’s history. The militant group known as ISIS took responsibility for the attack within days.
Near the body of one of the terrorists a Syrian passport was found. Speculation immediately swirled that one of the perpetrators was a Syrian refugee who gained access to the EU and then perpetrated the attacks. Records indicated that someone carrying the passport registered it on the Greek island of Leros several weeks earlier.
Critics immediately began pointing to the episode as proof of the danger of Western countries admitting Syrian Refugees. The implication was that refugees from Syria were gaining access to Western countries in order to carry out terrorist attacks. The theory, however, was debunked in the following days. According to French intelligence officials, the passport belonged to a member of the Syrian National Army who died months before the attacks in Paris. It mattered little. The damage to the plight of Syrian refugees had been done.
The Syrian Civil War has been raging for more than 4 years now. Bashar Al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on his people has resulted in the deaths of 250,000 Syrians. The number of people displaced by the conflict has reached 12 million – nearly half of Syria’s pre-war population. There are 4 million Syrian refugees living in neighboring countries. But perhaps most significant is the effect the refugee situation is having on Western nations at this time.
Applications for asylum to the EU and the US have more than tripled in the last year alone – from under 100,000 to about 332,000 this year. The pictures of refugees desperately trying to make their way across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe are heartbreaking to say the least. But it’s the attacks in Paris that have placed Western nations in an interesting dilemma where action on the conflict is all but unavoidable.
There are real security concerns associated with taking in significant numbers of refugees from the affected areas. It is relatively easy for ISIS operatives to use the cover of refugees to make their way to the EU and to the US. It doesn’t really matter that the passport found during the Paris Attacks turned out to be a forgery, nor that there is very little threat from Syrian refugees themselves. (Worth noting here is that Syrian refugees are fleeing Syria mainly to get away from violence, including and especially from that perpetrated by ISIS. Also worth noting is that ISIS doesn’t want Syrians to leave Syria. They would much rather have them stay and serve as subjects, so giving Syrian refugees a bad name furthers ISIS’ goals.)
But what matters is that it has been shown that accepting refugees exposes Western nations to significant security risk. Even if that risk is from people only posing as Syrian refugees is damage enough. Yet closing borders paints the West as indifferent and ambivalent to one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. It also, not inconsequentially, goes a long way toward affirming one of ISIS’ main claims: that the West is at war with Islam and with Muslims.
The West suddenly finds itself in an impossible situation: expose itself to real security risk or risk affirming one of ISIS’ main recruiting claims – that we are indeed embroiled in a clash of civilizations. And that impossible situation stems, mainly, from the lingering Syrian Civil War. Bashar Al-Assad has indirectly, unwittingly placed the wealthiest, most powerful nations in the world in an untenable position. And by doing so he has placed himself in an untenable position.
On the weekend following the Paris attacks, US President Barack Obama and Russian President (and main Assad supporter) Vladimir Putin were seen huddling one-on-one, engaged in what looked to be a serious conversation during the G20 summit in Turkey. Many wondered what they were talking about. My money is on Syria. Even if Putin has not agreed to the full removal of Assad from power, it would seem certain that he has agreed to some kind of transition-of-power plan. I found it not very surprising at all when in recent days Putin declared that “there is an understanding about where to go from here,” between the US and Russia on Syria.
Paris is about 2,600 miles away from the Syrian capital of Damascus. And there is no connection between the Syrian regime and ISIS, which carried out the attacks. But if there is one person who didn’t get a whole lot of sleep the night of the Paris attacks, it was probably Bashar Al-Assad. He could probably tell fairly quickly that a steep political price for the attacks was about to be paid, by him.
