Pompeo Urged to Press Russia Over Syria Humanitarian Crisis
Pompeo Urged to Press Russia More Over Syria Humanitarian Crisis
(Bloomberg) -- The Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee urged Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to do more about the humanitarian crisis in northern Syria, as the Russia-backed Assad regime conducts an offensive that’s fueling a new wave of displaced persons.
“Russia has repeatedly bombed hospitals and attacked medical workers in Syria for years, in violation of international norms,” Representatives Eliot Engel and Michael McCaul wrote Pompeo on Thursday. “Russia’s seat on the Security Council should not give them a license to murder civilians. We urge you to continue to raise these despicable actions in international fora and to prioritize accountability and justice for Russian war crimes.”
The House members cited the recent U.S. troop withdrawal in northeastern Syria as contributing to the ongoing crisis.
“An abrupt withdrawal of United States military personnel is beneficial to adversaries of the United States government, including Syria, Iran, and Russia,” they wrote. “We urge you to work with others in the administration to clarify our force posture and military mission in Syria in order to provide certainty for our troops and partners alike.”
Engel, the committee’s Democratic chairman, and McCaul, its top Republican, want the administration to apply economic pressure on those conducting the offensive and for the administration to ask Turkey to do more to ease the humanitarian suffering the offensive is causing.
In a separate statement, Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday that the “Trump administration has ceded American leadership in Syria to countries whose policies are fundamentally at odds with our own, and we are seeing some of the terrible consequences of that abdication of leadership.”
Morgan Ortagus, the State Department’s spokeswoman, said in a tweet on Thursday that the Syrian people “are living through a nightmare of death and destruction.”
According to the United Nations, more than 1,700 civilians have been killed and almost 900,000 people have been displaced since the Syrian offensive intensified in early December, the lawmakers said in their letter.
Separately on Capitol Hill, a group of Syrian aid workers and activists gathered to press the U.S. government to do more. Zaher Sahloul, a doctor and executive director of an aid group, brought with him two pictures painted by a pair of 12-year-old girls using the mud from a refugee camp near Idlib where they were living.
Sahloul called on President Donald Trump to “force Putin to stop the bombing” and called the crisis the worst he’s seen in a disaster region.
Robert Ford, who was ambassador to Syria under the Obama administration, said Turkey may need to invoke NATO’s Article 5, which pledges a collective defense against attacks on a member, to press the U.S. and other allies for military assistance along its border. Turkey has asked the U.S. to deploy two Patriot missile-defense batteries on its southern border, according to a senior Turkish official in Ankara.
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has never seen fighting of this intensity this close to the border of a member state,” Ford said. “This is new. It is, in so many ways, unprecedented.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Flatley in Washington at dflatley1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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