Humanitarian consequences of the actions of the terrorist group known as “Islamic State”

In just over 4 years what began as a peaceful protest in Syria has left over 200,000 dead, 3.5 million refugees and twice that number displaced within the country. It is futile now to rehearse the mistakes made by the Syrian leadership and by the international community but those mistakes helped create the conditions which allowed Islamic State to emerge and to grow, and not just in Syria and Iraq. Their success there has encouraged jihadis to bring their own unique form of terror to the heart of Europe, to Paris and to Africa in Tunisia and to the Yemen. And almost certainly it won’t stop there.

The report rightly calls on member and non-member states of the Council of Europe to do everything in their power to seek a means of restoring peace to the region. But there is a consensus that there is no imminent prospect of a resolution of the conflict. If there is no imminent resolution then neither the refugees nor the displaced will be returning home any time soon. In fact the likelihood is of more refugees. If we admit defeat in respect of effecting a quick end to the conflict, we cannot do so in respect of dealing with the humanitarian consequences. If we do, then we will face the even greater challenges of destabilisation in the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.

I support the call for greater solidarity with Syrians, ensuring refugees are not returned to countries lacking reception and protection capabilities, ensuring transit visas are granted at airports and the call to cease collective expulsions at borders. In short, we need to accept that every Syrian asylum seeker is, ipso facto, a refuge under the UNHCR definition.

Some countries have offered settlement programs and many of us could do more. But the truth is that the sheer scale of the numbers involved means, that even the most generous and open response from countries offering resettlement, refugee or leave to remain status, can never do more than deal with a fraction of the displaced population.

This being the case places an even greater obligation on all of us to at least burden share in a much more generous way with those countries now playing host to thousands of refugees. There are now more migrant refugees than any time since World War 2 and this places an impossible demand on UN Aid agencies funds. UNHCR reports a catastrophic drop in its resources as demand for its services rise and the rise of the dollar halves its purchasing power.

Even if the hope of restarting a peace process is bleak, the international community must at least redouble their efforts to persuade both government and all insurgent forces to allow aid into Syria itself where conditions are so bad the life expectancy of Syrians has fallen 30% in 4 years from the 79 years typical of a Western European country to 55 years, typical of Burundi or South Sudan. In Islamic State dominated areas many women haven’t left the house for months, a half of all children haven’t been to school for 3 years. Tragically much of the drop in life expectancy is due to the high mortality of youth and children as food, vaccines, and health supplies and services have all but disappeared.

  We cannot sit here comfortably, purporting to be an organisation dedicated to promoting human rights and at the same time not do everything in our considerable power to at least ensure that lack of funding is not the barrier to aid.