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Syria after Five Years of Conflict
(New Yorker) Robin Wright - Robert Ford, the last American ambassador to serve in Syria, recently discussed the Syria quagmire in an interview. "The cessation of hostilities in Syria has broken down completely. The bombings of hospitals in Aleppo and Idlib are a violation of every human norm - and that's not including the barrel bombs and the chemical weapons. The effort to get a political deal is going nowhere. The Assad government has refused to make any serious concessions. It won't let in food aid, in violation of UN resolutions. And the Americans are watching it all happen." "Without greater pressure on the Assad government, it will be impossible to secure the compromises necessary to win a political agreement and end the war....The Administration needs to reconsider tactics to generate that pressure." "The war has spiraled from a popular uprising demanding changes in the Syrian security establishments to an international conflict that has drawn in regional and international powers and destroyed large portions of Syria. It has also destabilized countries in Europe as well as spawned the most virulent form of Islamist extremism yet seen." "The Syrian Sunni Arab community views the Assad government as a greater problem than the Islamic State. Syrian human-rights organizations have pointed out that that government has killed seven times more civilians than ISIS has."