Syrian refugee crisis: news and updates

US officials warned Turkey this week against expanding its so-called buffer zone in northeast Syria, saying such a move would complicate counter-ISIS measures, and would increase the violence that Kurds and Syrians in the region have faced since Turkey’s initial incursion in 2019.

“We strongly oppose any Turkish operation into northern Syria and have made clear our objections to Turkey,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Dana Stroul said in a speech at the Middle East Institute Wednesday. “ISIS is going to take advantage of that campaign, not to mention the humanitarian impact.”

The Trump administration opposed a bill that would allow Kurds and other Syrian refugees to immigrate to the US more easily as Turkey’s recent offensive in the war-torn country has left tens of thousands of civilians displaced, according to a leaked State Department memo first reported by the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan.

The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, would allow certain Syrians to obtain US visas in return for aiding US military efforts in the ongoing Syrian civil war, and to come to the US as refugees more quickly. It would also impose sanctions on Turkey for buying Russian missiles in defiance of the US and NATO allies.

The Syrian government is likely on the verge of launching a bloody offensive to capture the last major rebel stronghold in the country: Idlib. And if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces succeed, it will all but confirm the regime’s victory in the seven-year war.

The anticipated military campaign in the northwestern Syrian province, which experts think will include airstrikes and possibly chemical weapons, has the potential to turn into a huge humanitarian catastrophe. Nearly 3 million people live in the territory, more than half of them displaced from other parts of the country due to the war. It’s home to scores of civilians, rebels, and a powerful terrorist organization — and they don’t have anywhere else to go.

President Donald Trump and his administration are still deciding whether and how to escalate the US’s military presence in Syria, after another chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians that has been linked (though not definitively) to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. But there’s a basic recognition that the war is horrific and it needs to end soon.

Defense Secretary James Mattis illustrated the horror of the Syrian conflict Thursday by telling the House Armed Services Committee, “I’ve seen refugees from Asia to Europe, Kosovo to Africa. I’ve never seen refugees as traumatized as coming out of Syria. It’s got to end.”

Friday evening, Donald Trump banned every single one of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees from entering the United States — indefinitely. These are people who are fleeing the most vicious war in the world, one which has claimed roughly 500,000 lives and displaced over half of Syria’s population. They are fleeing hell. America just told them to go back.

This sounds horrible abstractly. But when you look at what life is like for Syrians, either inside Syria or in refugee camps, you see how truly miserable their lives are. For people living in comfort in the West, it is nearly unimaginable: entire neighborhoods leveled, and millions of people living in squalid, dangerous conditions. These nine photos illustrate just how bad life has gotten for many Syrians today — and the true cost of Trump’s latest executive order.

Many of the politicians who think the US should stop accepting Syrian refugees have put forward an elegant-sounding alternative: Syrian refugees should simply be housed in neighboring countries instead. After all, other Middle Eastern countries are both geographically closer and — at least in the eyes of US politicians — culturally similar to Syria, so it makes sense to keep refugees somewhere they’ll be more comfortable.

Ted Cruz has endorsed this solution: “We should be resettling them humanely in Middle Eastern countries that are majority Muslim,” he said last week. Donald Trump has endorsed a (much weirder and much less clear) version: He wants a “safe space” cleared in the Middle East for Syrian refugees, somehow paid for by Saudi Arabia. Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis was one of several House Republicans who said this week that it would be more “humanitarian” to keep Syrian refugees “close to home” than to allow them to come to the US.

The Obama administration has a big Syrian refugee problem.

The House of Representatives just voted to approve a bill that would allegedly require three top administration officials, including the FBI director, to approve every individual Syrian refugee asking to enter the US. The administration argues that the bill would essentially stop America from taking in any Syrians at all. But it can’t even convince members of the president’s own party: The bill passed the House with a veto-proof majority.

Desperate people, fleeing a terrifying, bloodthirsty regime, try to find refuge in the US. But the American government and the public don’t want to accept them. They worry that accepting refugees would put citizens at risk, and they don’t see the refugee crisis as their problem to fix. So they are turned away.

This is what could happen in the US in 2015, if the governors and members of Congress pushing to stop the admission of Syrian refugees have their way. But it’s definitely what happened in 1939 to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The US (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis. They didn’t. At one point, the US literally turned away a ship of 900 German Jews. Shortly afterward, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety.

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, 26 governors have pledged not to allow Syrian refugees to settle in their states. The proclamations led to heated debates over whether Syrians ought to be allowed to settle in the United States at all or whether — as New York Sen. Chuck Schumer put it — “a pause may be necessary.”

There’s a key fact missing in these big political fights: States are not, currently, being overrun with Syrian refugees. Quite the opposite; data shows only a tiny fraction of Syrian refugees have settled within American borders. The United States has, since 2013, resettled fewer than 2,000 refugees — a mere 0.05 percent of all Syrian refugees worldwide.

David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, thinks the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a good idea and that there should be more of that kind of thing.

Bowers, like a lot of state and local government officials, is trying to prevent Syrian refugees from being resettled in his area. Unlike most state and local government officials, however, he justifies his actions by saying we should be at least as harsh toward Syrians because of ISIS as FDR was to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor:

The panic over Syrian refugees has officially crossed into the real world. This week, the state of Indiana succeeded in getting a refugee family that was supposed to settle in Indianapolis sent to Connecticut to live instead.

This almost certainly won’t be the last time governors try to keep out Syrian refugees. Here’s how it happened, and why it could put the whole refugee system under strain.

The 27 states that have declared they won’t admit Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris terror attacks can’t actually prevent refugees from entering their territory. But they can make it much harder for them to learn English or get jobs.

States have a much bigger role in helping refugees settle in the US than they have with other kinds of immigrants. Usually, that’s what makes US refugee policy special. But if governors really wanted to make life harder for refugees, they could seriously damage the US’s ability to turn refugees into Americans.

Mike Huckabee said in an interview on John Gibson’s Fox News Radio show today that the United States shouldn’t be taking in Syrian refugees because it is cold in Minnesota.

The best thing about this statement is that it refutes itself. Minnesota is actually one of the most welcoming states in the country when it comes to refugees. In the 1980s, the Minneapolis–St. Paul area became the top destination in the US for Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. And starting in the 1990s, Minnesota has been one of the leading destinations for Somali refugees as well.

Outright refusal to allow Syrian refugees into the US is gaining steam among Republicans. Republican presidential candidates are calling to limit immigration to only Christian refugees (or to end it entirely), and several Republican governors are now openly refusing to allow any Syrian refugees to resettle in their states.

The rationale is that the US isn’t doing enough to screen refugees before they enter the country — running the risk of ISIS infiltration. But it’s bitterly, tragically ironic that this idea is gaining momentum right now. The sad truth is that the US’s insistence on screening Syrian refugees carefully, and its almost paranoid aversion to admitting anyone whose family might have had any form of contact with any extremist group at any point, created a bottleneck that for years prevented nearly any Syrian refugee from coming to the US. The federal government has just, in 2015, started devoting enough resources to screening refugees who’ve fled Syria to start allowing them to come into the country in any numbers at all.

BERLIN — On September 2, Ole Seidenberg flicked on the morning news in Berlin and saw an image he still can’t get out of his head: a police officer holding the tiny, limp body of a 3-year-old Syrian refugee who had washed up on a Turkish beach while trying to flee by boat to Greece. The photo of the dead boy has since become the most famous symbol of Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis.

Seidenberg thought of his own 4-year-old daughter and quickly canceled a holiday in the countryside that he and his wife had planned. Instead, the 32-year-old social entrepreneur decided to take a very different trip: He drove out of Germany, through Austria, and into Hungary to pick up refugees and ferry them back to his home country, a move that would help them gain asylum.

The wildly popular Humans of New York project started out as a way for photographer Brandon Stanton to appreciate the everyday lives of strangers. Only a couple of years later, he ended up with more than 10,000 portraits and a best-selling book. For the past several days, though, Stanton has shifted his focus to documenting the journeys of Syrian refugees and migrants.

Writing on Facebook to HONY’s 15 million fans, Stanton said the broader reasoning for his new mini-project was to document the sheer scale of Syrian migration: “These migrants are part of one of the largest population movements in modern history. But their stories are composed of unique and singular tragedies.” The effort distinctively embodies the philosophy of helping others by using the skills you have — in this case, Stanton is using his mass social media following to share with the world how a few people survived living in the Syrian war.

The European refugee crisis keeps getting worse. Instead of coming together to figure out a permanent policy to handle refugees, EU countries are currently trying to ship refugees back and forth to each other en masse: Germany has closed its border with Austria off and on, Slovenia is sending trainloads of people back to Croatia, Croatia is bussing them to the border with Hungary, and Hungary has built a wall to keep them out.

The problem for Europe is that it doesn’t have a reliable system in place to do what it has to do under international law: offer asylum to refugees fleeing persecution. Most of the people coming into Europe are seeking asylum, whether they come from war-torn countries like Syria or not. And while no European country is necessarily violating international law right now, the continent, as a whole, is coming dangerously close to falling down on its legal obligation.

“We have not reached a decision on quotas and details of relocation,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière announced after the EU emergency meeting in Brussels. He sounded disappointed, and he had every reason to be.

On Monday, a meeting of 28 EU countries produced little more than a vague agreement that 160,000 refugees ought to be redistributed across Europe. That’s fine as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go very far. Recent history shows that without a binding quota system, redistribution won’t happen. In other words, instead of coming up with an effective, binding solution to the refugee crisis, EU nations have simply expanded the existing ineffective solution to cover many more people.

Germany is introducing temporary controls on its southern border with neighbor country Austria to cope with the influx of migrants, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière announced on Sunday. “The aim of this measure is to limit the current flow to Germany and to come back to an orderly process at entry,” de Maizière said at a hastily called news conference. He also claimed “urgent security reasons.“

The decision marks a surprising turnaround in Germany’s dealing with the current refugee crisis. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel had recently followed a policy of open borders and taken a moral leadership role in the refugee crisis. For example, she had announced Germany’s intention to take up considerably more refugees and provided for €6 billion in emergency aid.

Almost everyone agrees that the tens of thousands of people fleeing into Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, and other locations constitutes a crisis. But there’s no agreement about the solution — whether they should be welcomed or prevented from entering.

That split goes so deep that the two sides can’t even agree on what the people entering Europe should be called. To those who view them sympathetically, they’re refugees; to those who want them kept out, they’re migrants.

The video begins with hundreds of desperate migrants running across the Serbian border into Hungary, one step closer to a country that might shelter them. Many of these people have escaped from Syria, home to perhaps the world’s most devastating war, and just want to get past the crushing police presence at the border and into the European Union. Imagine witnessing all of that, and then doing what this camerawoman does in this video:

That’s right: She sees a Syrian father carrying his child, and decides the best thing to do is to trip him. Other points in the video show her kicking other refugees, including children.

The US is supposed to be a haven for people fleeing persecution: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” and all that. So as Europe’s refugee crisis has grabbed the world’s attention, more and more people have started to ask the US government: Why isn’t the US doing more to help Syrian refugees?

The federal government’s response has indeed done something, announcing Thursday it will take in “at least” 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next fiscal year. That’s many more than the 1,500 it’s taken in so far. But compared with the 800,000 refugees Germany has promised to take in for asylum — not to mention the 4 million Syrians who’ve fled their country and are living as refugees around the world — it doesn’t look like much: