It’s Really Hard To Help Syria’s Earthquake Victims

in Syria. The country and its leader Bashar al Assad are cut off from most other nations by US and European economic sanctions that are aimed at pressuring Asad's regime. For more than a decade, he has violently tried to crush opposition. Governments and relief organizations that want to help are often obstructed by the demands of the government, which tries to control the flow of money and supplies, and there's sometimes wary of running afoul of the sanctions, which

can come with heavy penalties. What we hope to see is thus all viable routes into northwest Syria are open to ensure that aid agencies can really get into the country on scale and speed necessary to deal with this really devastating crisis. That's Jennifer Higgins with the International Rescue Committee. It's a group that's trying to get past all these hurdles and help earthquake victims in Syria. And we'll hear

more from her in just a bit. First, my colleague Sylvia Westall in Dubai and Nick Wadham's in Washington are here to untangle the complexities of trying to do the right thing in a volatile part of the world. Sylvia, can you describe what's happening right now both in Syria and in Turkey? What was saying is a very different picture on the Turkish and Syrian side, although you know they're obviously affected by the same earthquake and their populations

that live very closely together along the border. A lot of the focus has been on Turkey and the earthquakes because the actual epicenter of the earthquake was in Turkeing Gaziana, and there's just been sort of much more coverage about what's been happening there. Um, it's easy to report there, it's easy to get information and to understand what's happening.

These are also areas that are important to the Turkish government, their strongholds of support for President Urdu and his party had kind of an updated death and injuries toll of people from Turkey. But Syria, the information has been quite spotty UM and the numbers don't really make sense. They have been reported on the official news agency Nikkas. Sylvia points out earthquakes. You don't care about borders, but governments do.

And that difference between the response in Syria and the response in Turkey, especially from the world community, has been very different, in part because of the heavy sanctions against Syria. Can you explain just exactly why Syria has become essentially a pariah nation. The Syrian civil war began in about two thousand eleven, and since then Bashar Alasa, the president, has committed a series of abuses against his own people,

including chlorine gas attacks. UM and the country has essentially been driven by civil war and is now divided into a series of territories where various groups have control. And I mean, my my impression from the U. S side is that there's basically assad and then this whole array of other groups including you know, the remnants of the Islamic State UH, and then you have the involvement of all sorts of other countries from the outside obviously Turkey, Israel,

um Iran. It's just sort of become this welter of groups where the battle lines are not clear and are constantly changing. You know, Sylvia, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Actually, like half the time, I'm not even really sure what anybody is fighting for anymore. I mean, it's been eleven years since the start of the Civil War, and it can sometimes feel very hard as an outsider to really understand. I mean, you know what us adds motivations are. He wants to stay in

power and have as much control as possible. But all the other groups, it's like, what do they want? I would just question whether we can call it a civil war at all, because I guess the civil war is a war between its own people's and what we really have hair is a there's a conflict in a country that's drawn in lots of international powers and groups and aims and demands and so on. So I kind of try to avoid calling it a civil war in our

copy because it's it's kind of more completely beyond that. So, you know, it started off as a mainly peaceful uprising against the government. So you had this uprising, you had a very violent crackdown against it. So I think, you know, we're really seeing a war that's brought in global powers. If the Syrian government the main aim is to reclaim all Syrian territory and say this is Syria as Syria as a whole, and then these groups on the ground,

yet they all have different motivations. They want to hold onto the territories that they have, the areas that were affected by the earthquake. It's a mix of groups that control the territory. It's mainly out of government control. In those areas are groups like the kind of the remnants of the main Syrian rebel force. Also got the US backed forces, which involved mainly Kurdish fighters but also other

fighters from other groups. That's one other force. Um, you've got the remnants of a lost front al Qaeda Islamic state, but that's kind of quite a minimal presence, and I think perhaps in the US discourse that's kind of often highlighted as a as a main concern in Syria. And I would say, you know, all of this air space as well. You know, Russia basically controls the airspace, so

that's another element in there. You've got Iranian backed elements, You've got pockets of government held support, So it's this real mix of different groups in these areas. But the main kind of problem is within that area, you've got a lack of infrastructure for transporting large amounts of aid. In an effort to either boot us from power or sway the course of the civil war, the U S and its allies have imposed some of the most crippling

sanctions anywhere in the world. I mean up there with North Korea and Me and mar and it's really made Syria essentially one of the most isolated countries economically in the world. The middle class has scattered, international companies have completely scattered. There is no resource, there's no infrastructure now

on the ground for a lot of aid groups. Some aid groups do do work there, but there's really no financial infrastructure on the ground now for groups to go in quickly and to be able to provide the support, the humanitarian assistance that Syria would need. Yes, they've got, you know, people that have been internally displaced in the millions within Syria itself, and many of those people are in some of those zones. And then you've got also

people that have crossed over the border into Turkey. So you've got the largest refugee population in the world is in Turkey and in the very zone that was affected. So you've got you know, internal refugee in Syria, You've got refugees within Turkey. So you've got some of these most vulnerable populations in both countries that have been affected. UM, and Nick is right. You know, if you look at sort of the aid response, UM, it's very complicated in Syria.

And you know, you've seen sort of on the surface kind of what the Syrian government has been saying. We had assets Advisor Buthana Chaban saying that sanctions are to blame and if we just lift the sanctions, or if European and US now lift the sanctions and this will

help aid get through. But the actual picture is a lot more complicated, and the alluded to it's a very difficult for aid groups to operate in Syria, and most of the international aid groups have to go via Damascus with agreements with the government and then need to negotiate on aid transferring into non government held areas, so reweld

held areas and that's the second step. So the first step is getting into Syria itself, into the government held areas or talking with the government, and then crossing over the lines of the Syrian conflict into the areas that need it most. And that's where the real problem lies and real the real problem begins. And that's what perhaps the focus has been off Seria for a while. I covered the you know, the outbreak of war back in two thousand and eleven, and it's strange. It's the same

and trenched positions, the same problems as beginning. And that's kind of what the situation that is now and that I cannot get to the peat populations that really needed an aid is being used as a tool in the wider conflict. These people are being used as political porns in a way, in this in this war that's gone on since two thousand and eleven. The one thing, though, that's so interesting to me and frankly depressing, is how much Syria has slid off of the agenda in the US.

It just does not feel like a priority for the Biden administration. You know, when I started covering the State Department in John Carey was meeting Sergey level of the Russian Foreign Minister. The topic was Syria humanitarian corridors, trying to figure this out together under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There was a lot of pressure over the chlorine gas attacks.

It just felt like we were talking about Syria so much more in the West and now you you hear conversations about US troop presence, and it's sort of held up as this place a prime example of where the US is doing things, has troops on the ground that it's not really telling its own people about. But otherwise it just feels like it's been relegated to another one of these completely intractable problems that no one wants to

deal with. Sylvie and Nick, please stay with me. Our conversation continues after the break, Nick and Sylvia, and you describe all of this is why it has been so difficult to help people in Syria, certainly much harder than it has been in Turkey. And Syria of course has very little resources to come to the aid of its

own people and therefore reliant on international aid. Can you describe how sanctions are affecting the ability to deliver aid where it's needed, So the way that the entirety of u S sanctions policy is structured is on self compliance, on forcing banks UH and companies out there too police themselves on whether they are keeping up with sanctions, and even if they have made a mistake and done an inadvertent sanctions violation, they can be punished very very severe.

What would a sanctions violation be? Can you describe what a sanction is? In this case, you facilitate a transaction between an international aid group and an organization in Syria. If that organization in Syria is determined to have links to US ODD or the Islamic State or whatever else, they are a sanctioned entity. So whoever it is, a bank could be punished, you know, millions and millions of dollars for facilitating that transaction, even if it's nominally doing

so under the guise of humanitarian aid. And the whole idea there is to make it so that financial institutions don't even want to do it, that's right. So in some cases the Treasury Department leaves some of these rules intentionally vague as a as a way of scattering players from the market. They want to keep people out of Syria. So what they do is they just say you can't do business with these types of groups. We're not going to be very specific about the sort of business you

can and can't do. And the response is just that banks will say, Okay, we have these algorithms, we have these spreadsheets that tell us, you know who or what is on a sanctioned list, if it has anything to do with Syria, we're not going to have anything to do with you. I mean, I spoke to an international aid group at one point that was doing work in Syria.

They had to change who they did all of their banking with everywhere in the world, payroll, whatever it was, because the previous bank they were working with said, you have ties to Syria, we don't want to touch you at all. It's not only that banks don't want to have anything to do with Syria. I mean, they haven't had a relationship with Syria for for many, many years, but they don't even want to have a relationship with

a customer that might have some link to Syria. So the result is that it just makes a country like Syria. Even someone who is a citizen of Syria or people who have relatives in Syria who live in the United States, it makes those people radioactive as well. And we've seen this a lot, whether it's Iran, Syria, other sanctioned countries Venezuela, where people who have relatives or connections or do business in some way in those countries, they themselves can't even

get banking services Sylvia. What does that mean on the ground in Syria when we're talking about actual aid groups that normally rush into a disaster scene like this, what are they finding when it comes to being able to deliver help in this sanction nation. Well, I think there's two other things to think about with this. So it's true that you know, if a country is under sanctions, it complicates any kind of transactions, whether it's you know, trade, financial,

or anything like this. That's just a fact that it kind of holds people off doing it because they see, like Nick was saying, they see the word Syria or anything. I don't want to go there. However, I think there's an aid there's two different things. There's sort of aid channel through the U N and the EU, who have a system in place to do that via Damascus. So you have these sort of international groupings of aid, and then you have bilateral aid. So I think you know,

countries like the US, Germany, France. They won't do bilateral direct Syria to Germany, US to Syria eight because it's just too toxic. But they can contribute to an aid fund or aid via a u N agency or the EU. We should avoid the idea that sanctions necessarily means a stoppage. For example, sanctions haven't stopped the u A delivering aid to Syria, I mean, and the u A has has has airlifted tons of aid to both Syria and Turkey.

So there's a bilateral aid transfer for a country that has a different point of view about the sanctions there. So you have that, so the aid is kind of trickling through on a bilateral basis, and you've also got this international aid that can be channeled through the u N and the EU. The problem really lies is that, you know, the u N and the EU will deal with Damascus and then they need to negotiate in order to deliver the aid to the places that they think

it's needed. And it's always this very delicate game. You know, the government wants the aid, all aid to go to government held areas that it controls, but you know, some of these areas that are really hit are not government hold areas, So how do you cross those lines, how do you cross those battle lines? How do you cross into areas which you know you need to get government access? You need to be able to have the ability to

cross over. And also, you know, I think you know, we've also thought, you know, you need to be able to feel that it's safe and secure to cross these lines to deliver aid in the first place. And then how does the aid get transferred with the country itself? If you're dealing with Damascus, is Damascus going to allow aid flows to happen to all parts of the country And we've seen throughout the Syrian conflict that that's just

not happened. And if you're an aid group and the outside government is saying you must deliver it to us and then we'll make sure it gets there, there isn't a whole lot of faith. I imagine that USI is actually going to deliver that aid two areas not controlled by his government that he's trying to destroy. It's the constant dilemma of aid workers in Syria. What do they do? Do they deliver nothing? Do they deliver something and hope that it will get through? And how can they guarantee

that it will get through. There's been Turkish attempts to get cross border aid in um and through those checkpoints, which requires Russian Okay, again because the air space and the fact that Russia is very present in that area. So I think, you know, maybe in one way it would be easier for I know, the US has done it's supporting Turkish aide partners right through those cross border transfers that kind of make more sense than going through

Damascus and hoping it will get there. At least if you're going to Turkey, then things will get through that border. I guess the issue is that, um, you know, there's questions perhaps from the US or from other sides about which groups Turkey is delivering a too, and whether that can be tracked, and who they are and of those people that they don't like. So I think, you know, probably see the US Western powers opting to go through the UN, the EU, through Turkey and through other partners

that can do that. Nick. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the US decided to suspend some of the sanctions against Syria for humanitarian an earthquake relief. How does that work? The Treasury Department issues what's called a general license, and that theoretically would allow banks to facilitate transactions so that you can get money to the people who need it most. And what's actually happened in the Syria case, which is pretty extraordinary, is the general license is even more broad

than it has been in the past. So what the U. S. Government has said is basically, if you're facilitating a transaction into Syria and you are told that that money is going to be used for for humanitarian aid, you are basically absolved of all responsibility for what actually ends up

happening to that money. And this has been the problem in the past because a bank or a payment processor will facilitate a transaction and if the person that uses that money then takes it and spends it on something that it wasn't intended for, the bank can be punished. So what the government has said now is basically that is no longer the case. If if you are told this money is going to be used for humanitarian relief, you have no responsibility in terms of what actually ends

up happening to the money. And that's a big change. And so do you think that's going to open up the gates to more money going to Syria or our institution is still going to be like, yeah, you say that, but we're not going to risk everything on you know, hope mean that that's the case. I would not expect banks to get rid of their extremely cautious approach to Syria. Uh, this has been a perennial problem. The US government is constantly doing this, whether it's Iran, me and mar North Korea.

They say, okay, we provide exemptions for humanitarian aids. So the jury is very much out whether this much more sweeping license will help. But you know, Sylvia, as as you're saying, um, it's so much bigger because who are you going to give that money to? Is that infrastructure there? Will the partners be able to get the get the aid to where it needs to go. And in a lot of ways, those pathways are not really there, that

that infrastructure was all taken away. And to just expect that this is just going to suddenly kick back in the high year because the US government issued a license to allow the sort of transactions that it has spent twelve years trying to dismantle. That's gonna be a heavy lift, Sylvia. When you look ahead, what is the fate of all of these people already living in terrible conditions, whose lives have now been utterly devastated. This conflict in Syria has

been going on for more than a decade. This has reached areas that have been devastated. You know, basic infrastructure has crumbled in many ways. People have found a way to get along and and now they've got this new enormous challenge to face. It's, you know, real humanitarian crisis that's only got worse by what's happened. And I think, you know what, in terms of aid and what will happen, A lot depends on Turkey and how Turkey is able to see if it can somehow aid can be delivered

through more checkpoints with Syria. On the question of sanctions, the Syrian government has argued that all they need now is the lifting of European and U S sanctions and they've said that it's the sanctions that have made life impossible in Syria, and that's actually called the death of people under the rubble. So that's sort of the Syrian government line, and aid work as and diplomats involved are

really rejecting this idea. They say that the government in Damascus is exploiting the situation for its own gain um and they're saying that most serenade funded by European US goes for UN agencies and their local partners in the capitol, so it goes to Damascus, and that Syria has routinely blocked international aid to rebel held areas of the country, so it's and siphoned off supplies to government held areas. So it's more about the internal movement of aid that's

the problem, and that Damascus does get aid. It's not sanctions that are to blame for this. It's the internal movement of aid within the country that's the problem. And it's really interesting that you say that, Sylvia, because also historically, when you you look back at situations where countries have

been under heavy sanction. Uh, that's an argument that's been made before where a leader will find it politically expedient to blame sanctions on the countries that are applying them, because it gives them, you know, an outsider to blame

for policy that they themselves created. At the same time, I think what's so tragic about the serious situation is that the US, by imposing all these sanctions and essentially severing Syria from the global financial community, Washington has boxed itself out and lost whatever leverage financial leverage it had over Syria to affect any change. Nick Woddham's Sylvia Westall, thanks for talking with me today. Thank you when we come back. How one aid group is managing to get

help to earthquake victims in Syria. We heard Sylvia say that entering Syria through Turkey is one way AID groups can get help to the people there without having to go through the Syrian government or risk violating US and European sanctions. And that's what the International Rescue Committee is doing. It's a non governmental organization or NGO, and they're on

the ground in Syria. Now. Jennifer Higgins, who you heard briefly at the top of the show, coordinates the group's efforts in Syria, and she joins me now from a man Jordan's Jennifer, can you describe what you're seeing on the ground right now in Syria? Yeah, of course, I mean every day we're really still coming to grasp the

effects of this devastating earthquake. You know, more than twenty six million people have been affected, and this includes thirteen million Syrians who are already in crisis inside Syria and two million Syrian refugees who are living in the affected areas in Turkey. You know, the impacts of this earthquake

will really only exasperbate the needs of these people. At a time whenever we've seen temperatures plummeting and a winter storm coming into the area, and you know, we had the i r C had been warning for a long time about the devastating impacts winter would have on this highly vulnerable population, and you know, it's it's still very hard to tell how many people will be really left homeless from this crisis, and the huge numbers of casualties

especially is overwhelming and already critically fragile healthcare system in northwest Syria, and you know, following not only COVID nineteen, the conflict, but also a very recent cholera outbreak. You know, we had thirty thousand cases of cholera just in December, and we were responding to that already as an emergency.

There's really urgent medical needs in the hospitals, not only medicines, but bondages, pain killers, really all sorts of services, and around fifty seven hospitals were damaged due to the earthquake. We've been talking today about how sanctions against Syria make it very difficult to work inside the country and deliver aid to parts of the country that are controlled by

the government. Your group, the i r C, operates into a part of the country that is not controlled by the Assad government and therefore is outside the scope of sanctions for humanitarian purposes. Can you describe how you operate in this part of the country. I mean, this division of Syria and itself provides a huge challenge in terms of providing an uh you know, a good response to

vulnerable communities. But the real challenges that every year we're really seeing the humanitarian needs increasing, but yet the global focus on Syria and the finances being made available are really decreasing, you know. And what's challenging specifically about this area of the northwest of the country is that most of our staff from outside of the northwest can't enter, and this is why we really rely on our excellent team on the ground as well as our partner organizations

for providing our response, you know. And this is also further compounded by the fact that there's very limited crossings into the area and the last few years we've been only operating or the u N has only been operating through one crossing point called bab Ahawa. As NGOs, we use commercial routs across number of border crossing points to deliver assistance. But the scale of what US and local organizations can do with nothing really to match what the

u N can do. You know, this disaster clearly demonstrates the vital need to keep you know, life saving cross border assistance from Turkey into northwest Syria. And and you know, what we hope to see is that all viable routes into northwest Syria are opened to ensure that aid agencies can really get into the country at scale and speed

necessary to deal with this really devastating crisis. The government has tried to make heads so that all aid has to go through Damascus and then the government will distribute it. Has that hampered you at all? It hasn't affected us because we are still able to use the border crossing points from Turkey into northwest Syria and this has really

always been our priority. You know. Um Babahwa is specifically for the u N mandated aid, but there is also a commercial channel there which is the one that NGOs use and there's also some other gates like Baba Salam where we can also use the commercial channels to get necessary aid into the area. We've seen some delays over the last weeks of the transport of commercial goods, but you know, only time will tell if this is just

a backlog due to needs. But also we have to recognize that the area of Turkey that's been worse hit by the earthquake, you know, is really where all of these crossing points are. So you know, there's also just a lack of resources for manning these border crossing points

at the moment. But we're really watching closely to make sure that we can continue to escalate and get the goods that we need into into northwest s Ayria, you know, through these crossing points, because it's so difficult to deliver aid over these limited passages and routes into the country. How long do you think it will take before the necessary help can be delivered to all of these people

who are already suffering. Yeah, I think, you know, we're really trying to to keep our finger on the pulse in terms of this. It's been really hard over the last week, you know, amidst all of us, you can imagine everyone mobilizing so quickly to start to respond on the ground to understand the mechanisms by which we're going

to be able to provide aid. You know, Luckily for ourselves in the I r C, we have stocks on the ground, we have staff in place on the ground, and we have a delivery of pharmaceuticals due to come in the next weeks. So we just have to wait to see if it's able to really scale up quickly to meet the needs, because the pace at which we're seeing now is just is just not enough. And if we don't really urgently try and open up those roots and get more goods across, we'll just see more in

lives really needlessly being lost. Jennifer Higgins, thanks for speaking with me. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is

Vicky Virgolina. Our Senior producer and the producer of this episode is Katherine Fink, with additional production support from Federica Roman. Yellow Hill de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Westcasova will be back tomorrow with another big take.