10 Dec
At least 4 million Syrians have fled their homeland since 2011. Most have gone to neighboring countries.
The EU prevents the vast majority of Syrians displaced by the war from applying for asylum from countries close to home, which necessitates the perilous journeys refugees are taking to reach EU territory.
Meanwhile, just under 2,200 Syrian refugees have been allowed into the United States this year.
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ENDING THE REFUGEE CRISIS
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The war in Syria has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced 12 million, forcing more than four million to flee the country. The UN has called it “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our era.”
This poster represents the strength, humanity, and dignity of refugees. Download it here
But as poet Warsan Shire has said, “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”: the devastating and urgent refugee crisis is a humanitarian disaster grown from the deeper political disaster of the war in Syria.
Many assume that ISIS is committing the war crimes driving Syrians from their homes, but the truth is that the vast majority of Syrian civilians killed — more than 95% according to human rights groups — have been killed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
As the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura said, it is “totally unacceptable that the Syrian airforce attacks its own territory in an indiscriminate way, killing its own citizens. The use of barrel bombs must stop. All evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of the civilian victims in the Syrian conflict have been caused by the use of such indiscriminate aerial weapons.”
In addition to the Bashar al-Assad regime’s crimes against humanity, the war now also involves a host of regional, sectarian, and global actors all fighting their own wars, for which the United States bears no small responsibility. The Syrian war — and particularly the rise of ISIS — has everything to do with U.S. actions dating back to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which gave rise to ISIS in the first place. Even now the U.S. airstrikes in Syria and neighboring Iraq are escalating the war in both places.
Ending the refugee crisis must start with freedom and justice in Syria.
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