EAST GHOUTA, Syria — It is easy to drive around Damascus and remain blind to the horrors of the Syrian civil war. Much of the city remained unscathed and insulated from the brutal war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Former President Bashar al Assad’s palace remains perched on the hills overlooking the former Sheraton hotel. Crowds mull the streets, patronize restaurants, and shop at the city’s malls. The police don new uniforms and beards, but, at least in the capital city, largely leave people alone.
From Assad’s palace perched on Mount Mezzeh, he could see East Ghouta, a sprawling suburb of multistory apartment buildings, and a slum which more than a million Sunni Arabs called home. In the early morning hours of Aug. 21, 2013, the Syrian regime fired between eight and 12 rockets into East Ghouta. The sarin gas killed about 1,400 people, but the terror drove tens of thousands more away. While the international community focuses on a single outrage, Assad’s assault on East Ghouta was a daily affair. Hospitals and human rights groups place the conventional death toll in the region more than an order of magnitude higher. Assad’s constant bombardment left the entire suburb in ruins.
Last week, I visited East Ghouta. I am no stranger to war zones and recovery efforts. I have been to Gaza, the Islamic State capital Raqqa, and their main Iraqi base in Mosul. In November 2020, I traveled through Nagorno-Karabakh as its Armenian residents picked up the pieces after Azerbaijan’s initial assault. Last summer, I embedded with M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and this summer I surveyed the damage wrought by the Houthis and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula during their brief occupations of southern Yemen.
What I saw in East Ghouta was different. The scale of destruction in East Ghouta is far greater. Talk of genocide in Gaza is polemic; in Ghouta, the sectarian cleansing was real, deliberate, and forced on civilians. The urban destruction in Gaza is vast, but as soon as President Donald Trump’s ceasefire took effect, pictures began emerging of Palestinian men, women, and children celebrating in restaurants brimming with food. Urban warfare is destructive, but in Gaza, it was as precise as photojournalists’ cherry picking of destruction and efforts to photograph people with cerebral palsy to suggest starvation. Portions of Gaza transformed into rubble will likely be rebuilt quickly as billions of dollars in donor pledges pour in.
Not so in Ghouta. The White House and European Union might have reacted with outrage when Assad attacked East Ghouta’s civilian population, grandstanding and calling for accountability, but seven years after the guns fell silent, Syrians languish, and donors ignore East Ghouta. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has facilitated the return of many refugees from Lebanon and Turkey, but they struggle to find work, rebuild, and find schools for their children. UNHCR helps support microloans for tailor workshops and to help widows work, but they operate on a shoestring budget as donors instead look toward Gaza. Many returnees come on their own, exhausted and with minimal support.
This is unfair for myriad reasons. I am a critic of U.N. bloat, but UNHCR is the exception; it is among the organization’s leanest and most effective operations. UNHCR spends about $58 per refugee, while the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East spends almost five times as much with far less to show for it.
More importantly, while Hamas continues its violence in Gaza, with cheering crowds watching executions of those who oppose its rule, the returnees to East Ghouta are peaceful, seeking only to rebuild, clear rubble, and make sure areas their children might walk or play are cleared of unexploded ordnance.
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Progressives and human rights activists dismiss criticism over their silence toward the Uyghurs, Sudanese, and Congolese as “whataboutism,” arguing that raising questions about their silence does not change the supposed guilt in Gaza. It is much harder, however, to justify such silence in East Ghouta, a place of real genocide that seven years later remains forgotten. While Gazans demand billions of dollars almost as an entitlement, East Ghouta’s residents face a cutoff as UNHCR’s local funding grinds to a halt.
If governments, activists, and academics truly care, they would rally more for Ghouta than Gaza.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.