Syria’s Rising Death Toll: The Darkness Before the Dawn or Sign of a Grinding Stalemate?
Syria’s Rising Death Toll: The Darkness Before the Dawn or Sign of a Grinding Stalemate?
At least 60,000 Syrians have been killed in the country’s civil war since March 2011, U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay reported Wednesday. Despite that death toll, which Pillay described as “truly shocking,” U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned last weekend that the increasingly sectarian conflict could claim a further 100,000 lives in the coming year without necessarily producing a decisive outcome. Brahimi warned that the war “presents a grave danger not only to the Syrian people, but to the neighboring countries and the world,” and predicted that left unresolved, the conflict would turn Syria into an equivalent of Somalia — a failed state carved into fiefdoms run by local warlords.
Those grim assessments by U.N. officials are clearly intended to spur international stakeholders to act more urgently to end the conflict. “The choice,” warned Brahimi, “is between a political solution or of full collapse of the Syrian state,” adding that “if the only alternative is really hell or a political process, then all of us should work tirelessly for a political process.” That’s what Brahimi himself is tasked with doing, but he is encountering the same problems that bedeviled his predecessor, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who resigned as Syria peace envoy last year in exasperation at the refusal of the Syrian protagonists and their external backers to make the compromises necessary to stop the war.