(Above photograph of Aleppo is copyright of AP)

Syria is unable to cope with the impact of the earthquake that has hit its northern territories as well as southern Turkey. Its struggle to function as a state, and the multiplicity of local Syrian 'mini-states' on its territory, as well as regional and international countries seeking to advance their own interests inside Syria, have rendered the state incapable of key functions.

The US Treasury has just announced waiving of sanctions that affect sending humanitarian aid into Syria via NGOs and International Organisations is both good news and bad. It makes it easier for third party non-governmental bodies to act in Syria without fearing that they’ll be in contravention of US sanctions. However, with the Damascus Government still demanding that any aid, earthquake related or not, enter Syria via airports or border crossings that it controls, and be processed under Syrian state auspices, then any increased aid flow due to the US’ latest announcement will be confined to the one currently working and internationally-approved land crossing.

Bab Al-Hawa straddles Turkey’s de facto security zone inside Syria’s north-west where Ankara’s Syrian Islamist allies mostly have local authority. That border was shut for the first four days of the earthquake until the Turkish Government allowed prearranged aid lorries to cross via a partly destroyed road. The USA would in theory be happy for the Turkish or Iraqi crossings into the Syrian Kurdish-led Syrian north-east to be fully opened too. However this remains vetoed by Russia and China at the UN Security Council, and, in practise, by Turkey on the ground. Ankara still wishes the PKK-linked Syrian Kurdish self-declared autonomous zone to be squeezed. Other that is, of course, than the managed Syrian (Kurdish) oil trade with its Iraqi Kurdish brethren. Under Iraqi Kurdish (KDP) auspices, and via well-connected Turkish middlemen, this sees most of Syria’s oil exports arriving in Turkey without any revenue for the Damascus Government.

None of this situation is good news for ordinary Syrians. Their humanitarian plight, especially those who were already, pre-earthquake, unaffected by what came in or out of Bab Al-Hawa, was in any case precarious at best. Obviously, some of Syria’s publicly recently regained Arab friends have been willing to ignore the USA and literally fly in their own aid via Damascus Airport. While UAE pockets are potentially deep, its and Egypt’s currently small number of flights are unlikely to majorly address the tragically slim chances of any more survivors being fund among the Syrians unaccounted for in the devastation. However, their food, blankets and medicine will increase the chances of at least some of the currently alive but literally homeless being able to withstand the horror of their circumstances. It presumably won’t benefit those Syrians living in parts of the north that the Syrian Government and/or allied Russian or Iranian/Iranian-backed militia do not control. Internal de facto Syrian border controls are themselves a kind of Syrian Government sanction against some other Syrians living under the ‘wrong’ local Syrian administration. They mirror Damascus’ Russian (and Chinese) allies who do not want international crossings open that Damascus doesn’t control, while the US, and its fellow western, and quite a few western Arab, allies still remain committed to sanctioning the Syrian regime and any trade with it.

The humanitarian problem on the Syrian side of this now huge earthquake zone is plainly made worse by an unresolved 12 year civil war. However actions and inactions on the Turkish side are compounding Syrian suffering, whether it’s those displaced Syrians resident in earthquake affected Turkish territory or Syrians resident inside Syria. The Turkish politics behind tightly managed Turkish-Syrian border crossing points, and the ineptness of AFAD (the Turkish state body nominally responsible for disaster management) in its own country, are a double whammy for Syrians at this terrible time.

There are other aspects to Syria’s particular problem in dealing with the earthquake inside its official borders too. Crossing points between Syrian government-controlled territory and those parts of Iraq under the ostensible control of the Iraqi state, but in practise of the mostly Iranian-friendly Iraqi militia groups organised as Hashed Al-Shaabi (PMU), could in theory be proffering a lot more aid for Syria. That’s as opposed to their more typical border trade in men and materiel heading west in support of the Damascus leadership’s ongoing civil war with other parts of nominal Syrian state territory. Officially, of course, the Iraqi Government, that under its new leadership is keen to improve ties with Washington, would not wish to encourage even humanitarian border trade that by going to Syrian state bodies would still very much contravene the US Treasury’s latest announced sanctions ‘waiver’. This is all the more the case for Iraqi PM Mohammed Sudani when that same US Treasury has been withholding some of Iraq’s US dollar deposits in a bid to compound Iraqi currency weakness, and thus greater ordinary Iraqis’ immiseration, to get his government to crack down on illicit Iraqi US Dollar flows to the Iranian state. That such Iraqi financial ‘aid’ for Iran is a tight product of the financial-political-armed nexus between the dominant trends within the Iraqi Shia political plurality who both put Sudani into office and their Iranian military and political elite allies, only compounds the difficulty of too much aid flowing from Iran and/or Iraq into Syrian Government-held territory.

Yet, if for example Iraq’s western border crossing at Qaim, Anbar, which meets the Euphrates-based Syrian town of Al-Bu Kamal, was used by an Iraqi or an Iranian development/aid/humanitarian ‘NGO’ to funnel aid directly to ordinary Syrian victims of the earthquake in territory under Syrian Government control, this would seemingly not contravene the otherwise all-powerful US sanctions on Syria. Indeed the latest US Treasury ruling on sanctions and aid to Syrian earthquake victims says that the US sanctions regime on Syria already allowed for humanitarian aid to territory inside Syria - including that under Syrian Government control – as long as it is provided via ‘third parties’ i.e. presumably aid-orientated NGO/INGO bodies.

If Iranian ‘NGOs’ were talking about providing aid to Syria by this route, this could fall victim to Iraqi Government sensibilities about US sanctions on the Iranian state/state-related bodies and their senior apparatchiks. However there are plenty such Iraqi aid bodies and charities that cannot easily be judged to be state-related i.e. ‘GONGOS’. Furthermore, the proven capability of various Hashed Al-Shaabi militia to exercise for themselves what otherwise would be judged Iraqi sovereign state decisions, surely means that Iraqi, even Iranian aid, for Syria could indeed, should it be so willed, funnelled via the large swathes of the Iraqi border with Syria that the Hashed Al-Shaabi controls.

In other words there is a lot more to the Syrian humanitarian crisis – massively compounded by the earthquake in its and Turkey’s territory – than apparent US-sanctioned cruelty, ‘supported’ by western and Arab allies, and perceptibly signed off on by the UN. That said, the Al-Tanf crossing from Iraq into Syria, where the latter’s southern border also runs close to Jordan, is essentially a US military area with a US camp that, should the US political will be there, could be the forward base for funnelling a massive supply of aid into Syria, regardless of who the Syrian ‘partner’ was. Likewise aid could come via Jordan whose border crossing points into Syria have long been part of western and some other Arab states' isolation of the Damascus leadership. Aid could in theory come too via the buffeted but still relevant US military presence inside the Syrian Kurdish-run north-east that otherwise secures Syria’s oil for the benefit of the Syrian Kurds. The Lebanese Government, whilst mindful of western and residual Saudi pressure re links to Damascus, is reportedly open to chanelling some its meager aid resources across its border with 'Syria proper'. The Russian naval base at the Mediterranean port of Tartus, and Russian aircraft operating in support of the Syrian regime, could obviously do the same without worrying about US sanctions.

A seemingly non-existent US political will - as far as compromise on Syria is concerned - has actually for more than a year been, officially at least, willing to offer a waiver to the US’ ‘Caesar sanctions’ on Syria and Syria-related entities and individuals (including in Lebanon). This particular waiver was in favour of a proposed gas pipeline deal using extant facilities to take gas from Egypt to Israel, Jordan, and on to Lebanon via Syria. The latter’s assumed state-take of transit fees was presumably originally understood by the US as a necessary part of its waiver, in order to meet the greater goal of providing gas from ‘western friendly’ local states, including Israel, to a desperate Lebanon that would otherwise be more reliant on proffered Iranian energy largess (just as Iraqi gas needs are supposed to increasingly, but commercially in this case, be met by Iran). That gas deal though remains theoretical due in part it seems to US cold feet about Syrian beneficiaries and the extent of Hizbollah control over the Lebanese state. Ironic really as the US has recently played a key role in a Lebanese-Israeli maritime border recognition deal. This means that these two otherwise belligerent states can develop, with western, and Qatari in the Lebanese case, energy assistance, the production of locally-sourced gas. A now mooted Syrian-Lebanese maritime border deal could aid gas development between these two countries too, but Damascus may prefer to leverage this for an easing of the wider sanctions regime which even following the earthquake remains fixed.   

Tackling the political and practical problem of aid to Syria necessitates dealing with the fact that it is not so much a state, as series of mini-states where authority is either relatively fixed but still fluid; or just fluid. There is the 70% of Syria in territorial terms that the Damascus leadership controls whether through official or sub-state or Russian and Iranian allies; the aforementioned autonomous Syrian (Kurdish-led) north and north-east whose battlelines with the Syrian state ‘proper’ are often in flux; the Turkish-backed northern and north-western Syrian enclaves where largely the writ of Sunni Islamists runs including Al-Qaida descendants Haya Tahrir Al-Sham, as well as that of what is these days effectively a Syrian mercenary force, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (AKA the Syrian National Army of the Syrian National Council); and the constant movement in authority throughout great swathes of the Syrian south where Syrian Islamist rebels, Syrian government-related forces, Shia Islamist militia groups dominated by Hashed Al-Shaabi, and a diminished Russian and, as mentioned, US presence are all part of the mix. The south of Syria is still essentially stateless as opposed to the competing state/would-be state forces in the rest of the country.

Any meaningful initiative to tackle the short and longer term humanitarian needs of the Syrian people has to somehow negotiate its way through this complex of competing state, sub-state and anti—state forces, whether Syrian or foreign. Russia and Iran – active military players in the Syrian conflict and the Syrian state’s security -  plainly have to be as much part of any solution as Turkey or the USA. Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine - and the west’s adoption of the country and the conflict as being as essential to western security needs as Putin argues it is to Russia’s – means that Moscow isn’t any longer quite as decisive an actor in Syrian affairs as when it in effect saved the Damascus leadership’s control of (most of) the Syrian state. Russia is still, paradoxically, part of Syrian state sovereign authority in parts of the north and west. However Russia’s Ukraine focus means it is not playing a significant part in emergency relief in Syria that its naval and air bases inside the country could facilitate. Furthermore, Russia's Ukraine focus could easily mean that once the immediate horrors of the earthquake are at least eased, that Israel’s periodic bombing of perceptible Iranian-related targets inside Syria will resume but increasingly without both the relative air protection and/or military coordination with Israel that Russian intimacy with both Syria and Israel had previously afforded. Russian military and intelligence priorities and some kit are literally elsewhere. Russia didn’t and couldn’t prevent Israeli air strikes on Syria but the Russian military presence and support for Syria needed to be taken into consideration by the Israelis. This may now be less of a factor. Iran’s focus is almost as much on its adopted existential struggle in Ukraine (waged via military assistance to Russia) as it is in Syria via the IRGC or the latter’s Iraqi militia allies. Iran’s military and related capabilities are being increasingly hit by Israel inside Iran, itself an arguable indirect blow to the Russian war effort in Ukraine whose own priorities may also prevent Iranian desires for more advanced Russian airframes and air defences for itself. In other words Syria’s security, and the attention to Syria’s practical even humanitarian needs, are affected by the war in Ukraine and in particular Russia and its allies’ involvement in it.

None of this is good for ordinary Syrians – in whatever Syrian or Turkish-related jurisdiction they live under. The struggling Syrian state, and competing authorities inside Syria, cannot tackle a humanitarian catastrophe that, thus far at least, has done little to ease the damaging rival interests of neighbouring and international allies in its fate.