Rescuing Aid in Syria

Jon Alterman: Natasha Hall is a senior fellow in the Middle East program at CSIS. She's the author of a new report from the CSIS Middle East program, “Rescuing Aid in Syria,” and we're delighted to have her join us today. Natasha, welcome to Babel.

Natasha Hall: Thank you for having me, Jon.

Jon Alterman: Congratulations on this new report. You wrote about the problems of more than a decade of providing humanitarian aid to Syria. Why did you think this was an important issue?

Natasha Hall: Today, what we see in Syria is this beautiful country that's been pulverized. Families have been shattered. There are families displaced around the world—from Germany all the way to Syrians that I’ve met in Langkawi Island in Malaysia. Families have been ripped apart. The society has been shattered down to the level of cement in Syria. I've interviewed mothers with children that have lung infections because they breathe in the particulate matter from things that are kicked up from constant bombardment. This is a country that's really bleeding, and we don't see any end in sight. There's no politically acceptable solution to this conflict—this awful conflict on the horizon.

Natasha Hall: Because of that, the entire international community has decided that aid and diplomacy are going to be the way that they resolve this crisis, and what I've seen over the past ten years—from the practitioner side and the humanitarian world, but also on the analyst side—is that aid has tended to be a pat on the back for donor governments to feel like they're doing something in Syria. As a result of that dependence on aid, the Syrian government has manipulated the aid system to its benefit and to its allies' benefit, and it has deprived those in desperate need. So, I felt that ten years in, as we're looking towards early recovery—as it's clear that the Assad government might stay in power—what can we do to rescue aid and actually help Syrians in need?

Jon Alterman: Before you came to CSIS, you worked in the humanitarian field for more than a decade—with a lot of that time spent in the Middle East, and a lot of that time spent on Syria. You knew a lot coming into writing this report. As you researched the report, you spoke to more than 130 people. What surprised you and what did you learn that you didn't you expect to learn?

Natasha Hall: I didn't expect to see such understanding of the problems across the board. I spoke to UN officials. I spoke to international NGOs, local NGOs, and donor government representatives, and they all see these problems. They're all very concerned about these problems, but in a lot of cases—because they've been siloed in their individual corners, whether it's a specific UN agency or an NGO—they feel almost powerless to stop this manipulation.

Jon Alterman: Is the Syria situation different from humanitarian situations elsewhere? Is there a reason where Syria is an especially difficult case for the humanitarian community, and, if so, why?

Natasha Hall: Yes. I've thought about this a lot, because I've seen the good, bad, and the ugly out there—from Thailand to Kenya to Syria—and I do think that there are a few things that make Syria different. What worries me is that it might not be different for long. Let me tell you why. One reason is that crises are lasting much longer than they ever have before. The humanitarian world is being asked to do much more than it ever did before, so that's one factor that makes Syria different. The other factor is the sheer amount of assistance that's going into Syria. That was attractive to nefarious actors in the government as well.

What you also have in Syria—and this is really crucial—is a government that really stayed intact for the most part. And that's not often the case with humanitarian crises. I interviewed one career UN official who said that when she worked in Libya, she spoke to a minister of health that had no staff. That was simply not the case in Syria, and that allowed the government to really surveil, monitor, and completely control—essentially—the aid apparatus in a way that we may not have seen in other contexts. They did it in a very savvy way.

Jon Alterman: You said that in many ways, the government had already been engaging with the international community on assistance, and that almost gave them a head start when they had a crisis to steer to serve their interests.

Natasha Hall: Right. I was actually in Syria working with Iraqi refugees before the protests started.

Jon Alterman: In 2011.

Natasha Hall: In 2010—just before. I had seen individual bad apples within aid agencies. During that period of time, Syria had accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Iraqi refugees, and since Bashar al-Assad has come to power, there's been an influx of UN agencies and international NGOs into Syria. Prior to the protests starting, they already kind of knew how to work the system.

Jon Alterman: They've gotten tens of billions of dollars of aid assistance coming in, and then the government's managed to get its hands on a lot of it?

Natasha Hall: Yes.

Jon Alterman: How does that work?

Natasha Hall: I think it works through several different ways. The way that I'll divide this out is that through diversion—which we unfortunately see in a lot of humanitarian crises around the world—and that can be the military diverting food baskets for themselves or medical supplies. We've seen these in wars and conflicts all over the world.

I've also mentioned and noted the exchange rate, which is also an issue throughout the world. This is a way for the Syrian government to skim off the top—between 30 to 75 percent of any aid money that's spent in the country.

Then you have this manipulation where you are able to hire those that you want within aid agencies, give visas to those that you want, and then co-opt, threaten, or kill those that don't go along with what you want. We're in this situation where the government and its allies can dictate who gets certain contracts. As I point out in the report, oftentimes these contracts are doled out to people with direct ties to—or who are directly implicated in—human rights violations and war crimes.

Jon Alterman: Your report is divided into three very different areas. How do those areas differ from each other and how does this diversion, manipulation, and control differ from area to area?

Natasha Hall: I divided them up into different geographic areas of control. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) control the area in the Northeast, the opposition controls the Northwest, and then you also have government-controlled areas. The reason I did that is because the challenges are quite different in each area of control—that was borne out through the research as well. While I did see interference in the Northeast and the Northwest, it wasn't at the same level of ubiquity or control that the government has in government-controlled areas. I saw other challenges to the aid sector, such as the constant uncertainty in the Northwest as to whether or not the UN cross-border mandate will be renewed every year.

Jon Alterman: If you could just explain the cross-border mandate, for people who aren’t familiar.

Natasha Hall: In 2014, the UN Security Council agreed to allow the United Nations to deliver and implement aid cross-border without the government's approval in four different border crossings around the country.

Jon Alterman: Into areas that the government didn't control.

Natasha Hall: That’s correct, but since about 2019, Russia and China—both permanent members of the Security Council—have either closed border crossings or threatened to close the last border crossing, Bab al-Hawa in the Northwest, which serves about four million people.

Jon Alterman: You talked several times in the report about the bad habits that the international humanitarian community has fallen into in Syria, because this was never intended to be the long-term operation it's turned into. It's been going on for more than a decade. What are some of those habits we've fallen into and how do we break those bad habits?

Natasha Hall: It's really hard. This is not easy. I've been in the aid sector. Oftentimes when you're on the ground, you have all kinds of different priorities in front of you. You need to spend money. You're putting out fires—sometimes literally and figuratively—and you have to deal with some really nasty actors at the same time to get aid in and to deliver what people need.

At the beginning of all of this, the government established their red lines pretty clearly right away. For example, they said that the aid needed to be delivered through the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), which is now very much a government-affiliated organization. The United Nations hadn't agreed to that before. The United Nations hadn't agreed to state military escorts for aid convoys before, but all of these compromises were made rapidly because the humanitarian community thought they would get access, and they didn't.

During what I unfortunately call the besieged era, we saw hundreds of thousands of people starved into submission by the government. We still have those compromises. SARC—and now Asma al-Assad's organization, the Syria Trust for Development—still monopolize the aid apparatus. We're still in this very tangled web that the government has created. The government was very good at dividing and conquering the aid community. They tried to sideline Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which is the UN body that's supposed to coordinate all of these different activities, because they didn't want aid agencies to coordinate. They wanted all of them to be vying for attention and compromising with them with different line ministries.

Jon Alterman: Is this the way the Syrian government works with Syrians in normal times as well?

Natasha Hall: Absolutely. This is a regime that, historically, is excellent at psychological operations and manipulation. This was somewhat to be expected, but none of us could have predicted the scale and severity of the violence. The humanitarian community is somewhat stuck in the middle. One thing I will say is that it took the entire international community to shrug or to look away for this to happen. This wasn't any one aid worker, any one aid agency, or donor governments. Everyone had to be at play and not push for more reforms for this to happen.

Jon Alterman: You have a long list of recommendations. I just want you to give us the most important ones in each category. One is there needs to be informed action. What do you mean by informed action, and how does the international community pursue informed action?

Natasha Hall: There have been myriad evaluations and reports about the aid sector, and a lot of those recommendations have been shelved. One thing that I do recommend that donor governments specifically do—because they have the resources to do this, and they also have the power to do so — is a comprehensive evaluation and audit of the response to date. The reason I say this is because, often when I was speaking with donor government representatives and others, they say, "Well, at least the majority of aid is getting to people in need." I think we can actually question that at this point, and we need to have an evaluation to really understand the extent, and the scale of the manipulation and diversion. Without that information, it's difficult to move forward or know where to go next.

Jon Alterman: You talk about diplomacy. Where does diplomacy fit into this?

Natasha Hall: For diplomacy and negotiations, the way I see it is that it needs to happen on the ground, and it needs to happen at the highest levels. On the ground, what I mean is that in the Northwest we've seen groups like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) begin to manipulate aid. I argue that the aid community and donor governments actually have far more leverage over HTS to reduce that interference, but you need those constant negotiations; you need that collective leverage in order for that to happen. Then, at the highest levels, there simply needs to be a much more comprehensive effort that somewhat incorporates aid into diplomacy surrounding Syria, and looks at aid as really a strategic investment in the Syrian people.

Jon Alterman: On strategic investment, you talked about the need to promote resilience in Syria. How does the aid community do that?

Natasha Hall: There has been a lot of talk about early recovery in Syria, primarily in government held areas. Many find it controversial because it alludes to building state capacities, which obviously could be problematic for the humanitarian sector. What I argue though, is that we should also be talking about resilience and early recovery in the Northeast and the Northwest. These are areas where the needs are rising dramatically. We see people dying in these freezing cold winters every year in the Northwest. People are still living in these flimsy tents, and they're all entirely reliant on an unreliable UN cross-border mandate. We need to start promoting resilience and stability in these areas as well by securing ceasefires so that we can have this aid not just go completely to waste in another offensive, for example.

Jon Alterman: The last category you talk about is facilitation. What does that mean?

Natasha Hall: There's been a lot of discussion about sanctions and counter-terrorism measures and how they've affected the aid world. My argument is that while counter-terrorism measures and sanctions are vitally important to ensure that assistance or material support doesn't get to odious characters, the way that they are occurring right now is not beneficial for that goal, because essentially everyone is fearful that any kind of mention of difficulties with terrorist actors or with sanctioned actors will shut down programming altogether.

The other issue is just banking and de-risking. Aid organizations can't get the money they need into Syria; they can't get the resources into Syria. So, I don't think that sanctions and counter-terrorism measures alone should be the only proof of due diligence. Due diligence also needs to happen when you look at the people that you're procuring with, the people that you're implementing with on an individual level to ensure that these kinds of characters or these actors are not gaining from the aid system.

Jon Alterman: It's a really impressive report. It's 70 pages of fact finding, as I said, and more than 130 interviews. Who do you think, on the organizational level, is going to be happiest with your report, and who do you think is going to be frustrated, and why?

Natasha Hall: That's a good question. I don't entirely have the answer to that, but I think those that have to be a public face for aid agencies might be frustrated that they have to address some of these issues in the open. The majority of people I interviewed are UN officials, NGO workers, and aid workers themselves, and they want this information to get out. They are trying to do their best in a really bad situation, but they can't do it alone.

Frankly, there have been UN reviews and internal reports that have said the same thing. So, this is hopefully an opportunity for donor governments, the international community, and the aid community to come together and create something better. I look at this report as my Valentine, if you will, to the aid world. I believe in aid and I want it to be preserved; I want it to be the sanctified thing that we think it all is, but we need to do better than this.

Jon Alterman: Natasha, congratulations on the report and thank you for joining us on Babel.

Natasha Hall: Thank you, Jon.