Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) realeased the following statement:
Over the last five and half years, the Syrian people have endured one horror after the next. The Russian Federation has blocked international efforts to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo and has enabled the murderous Assad regime to continue its slaughter of Syrian citizens.
According to the United Nations, nearly one million Syrians are living under siege from their government. That is equivalent to more than the entire populations of Pennsylvania and Delaware suffering without access to food and medicine while hiding from daily bombardments.
This is not just a civil war. This is the Russian Federation -- a major country and member of the UN Security Council – and its client state dictator Bashar al-Assad slaughtering the Syrian people unchecked. It has direct impact on our national security and that of our partners in the Middle East and Europe.
We cannot allow Syria to remain a safe haven for terrorism, and I welcome the progress that has already been made to roll back ISIS’s control of territory in Iraq and Syria, yet as I have said before, the Assad’s regime’s actions have created the space and conditions for ISIS to thrive within its borders. Absent additional action from the United States and our partners to change the situation on the ground, I believe the conditions will continue to worsen.
I urge President Obama’s Administration to take immediate steps to help alleviate the suffering on the ground in Syria. As long as Assad thinks he is winning – and he is – the onslaught will continue and diplomatic efforts will fail.
The incoming Administration must see the Syria conflict as the national security threat that it is and take action accordingly. The fight against ISIS must be our priority, but the roots of ISIS’s rise cannot and should not be ignored- that means holding the Assad regime and the Russian Federation fully accountable for their crimes in Syria. Throughout his campaign President-elect Trump has sent disturbing signals about the way he views this conflict. Assad and Russia are not “fighting ISIS,” as the President-elect has asserted; rather, the Assad regime and the Russian Federation are engaged in coordinated attacks that target civilians, including children.
I urge the President-elect to remember, before his Administration leaps to mend ties with Russia or change the U.S. position on the future of Assad, the chaos they have created in Ukraine and Syria. The Russian Federation has negotiated in bad faith before, committing to diplomacy while escalating their indiscriminate bombing campaign in Syria and their support for separatists in Ukraine. President Putin is no friend of the United States. I’m troubled that Bashar al-Assad suggested during a recent interview that President-elect Trump could be a “natural ally” in the fight against what he calls “terrorists.” The U.S. must never ally itself with a regime that barrel bombs children, targets medical facilities and use starvation as a tactic of war.
The United States should pursue measures to hold Russia to its obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and consider implementing a no-bombing zone, which would help protect civilian population centers and key humanitarian infrastructure. I also believe that escalating sanctions against individuals and entities contributing to human rights atrocities would help increase pressure on the regime and its backers. I continue to believe, as I advocated for in 2011, that standoff strikes against the Assad regime’s airfields could ground their airplanes and substantially impact their ability to rain havoc from the sky.
As the humanitarian crisis continues to grow increasingly dire by the day, we must be bold in our efforts to get aid to those who need it most. We should explore ways that the U.S and our partners could help protect humanitarian aid delivery from Russian airstrikes and whether a surge of humanitarian aid along Syria's borders, as columnist David Ignatius recently advocated in the Washington Post, would force Russia and Syria to stand down and allow the aid to get through.
Documentation of Russian airstrikes in Syria over the last several weeks clearly shows that Russia is lying: Russian forces are not focused on fighting ISIS. They are bombing hospitals, schools, and neighborhoods well outside the territory where ISIS operates. These airstrikes, increasingly using sophisticated “bunker-buster” munitions, have killed hundreds in the past several weeks.
As UN Envoy Stephan de Mistura recently said, “We are running out of time, we are running against time.” Indeed the people of Syria are running out of time, and the U.S. should take action to stop the killing in Aleppo and deliver humanitarian aid. We have a moral obligation and a national security imperative to do so.
