Tag Archives: syrian

A Week of Slaughter in Aleppo Also Destroyed One Of Its Hospitals

by porvluef Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday night, two missiles from the Assad regime’s Syrian Arab Air Force struck the Al Quds hospital in Aleppo, killing at least 14 medical staff and patients, including one of the last pediatricians who still worked in Syria’s largest city. Within 24 hours of the attack, widespread airstrikes and shelling in the area killed at least another 60 people, bringing Syria’s death toll for the week to around 200. Rescue workers from Syria Civil Defense, which lost five of its own members when targeted strikes hit one of its centers earlier in the week, report that they are “still dragging people from the rubble.”

“This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area,” wrote Muskilda Zancada, Doctors Without Borders’ head of mission for Syria, in an online statement. “Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?”

In Syria’s five-year-old war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the attack on the Doctors Without Borders-supported Al Quds hospital is part of a broader pattern of Bashar Al-Assad’s systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure. Airstrikes on civilian neighborhoods and medical facilities are the norm, despite being illegal under international law. The United Nations estimates that at least half of Syria’s medical facilities have been destroyed. A report from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) from February 2015 estimated that some 600 medical professionals had been killed in the fighting, a figure that doesn’t account for the past year of the conflict.

“Compounding this tragedy is that the dedication and commitment of the staff of Al Quds, working under unimaginable conditions, has been unwavering throughout this bloody conflict,” said Zancada. A press release from SAMS this morning said that Mohammed Wasim Moaz, the last remaining pediatrician in the eastern part of Aleppo, was considered “one of the best pediatricians left in Syria.”

This week’s increased attacks on Aleppo come amid what was supposed to be a partial ceasefire in Syria, but which has all but collapsed. Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, characterized the talks as “barely alive,” the Guardian reports. “How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?” he asked.

Meanwhile, many believe the situation in Aleppo will only get worse in coming weeks, with reports of a military buildup around Aleppo that some fear will result in the government’s attempt to embark on a complete siege of the city’s civilian neighborhoods.

“Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over,” said Valter Gros of the International Committee of the Red Cross in a statement yesterday. “There is no neighborhood of the city that hasn’t been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next.”

In videos of the ongoing violence posted online, rescue workers drag bodies—including those of children—from collapsed buildings, old men sob, residents race injured victims away in cars, and a terrified young girl in pigtails cries quietly in the arms of a man.

A week before the most recent onslaught, Syria Civil Defense—a volunteer organization established in 2013 that attempts to provide help to victims of the massive bombing campaigns—posted a heartbreaking tweet, as new rounds of airstrikes began hitting Aleppo following a brief respite from the fighting under the ceasefire. The tweet foreshadows what appears to be yet another bloody chapter in Syria’s war:

“We return to work with sadness and heavy hearts,” Syria Civil Defense reported a few days later. As the UN warns of a “catastrophic breakdown“—noting that in the past 48 hours, one Syrian has been killed every 25 minutes—the worst may still lie ahead.

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A Week of Slaughter in Aleppo Also Destroyed One Of Its Hospitals

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Republicans Are Pushing Obama to Fill This Court…To Try Syrian War Crimes

by MatthiasFyo Posted on March 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution accusing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his allies of committing war crimes. The resolution comes amid concerns from Republicans and some Democrats that the Obama administration—under pressure from Moscow—has all but abandoned its goal of regime change in Syria. It calls on the White House to use its influence at the United Nations to establish a Syrian war crimes tribunal.

“The government of Syria has engaged in widespread torture and rape, employed starvation as a weapon of war, and massacred civilians, including through the use of chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and barrel bombs,” the resolution asserts. It adds that “the vast majority of the civilians who have died in the Syrian conflict have been killed by the government of Syria and its allies,” including Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. As many as 470,000 Syrians have died so far in the conflict, and millions have been made homeless.

The resolution’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who first introduced this bill in 2013, says that establishing a war crimes tribunal for Syria would force a stronger stance from Washington, make it more difficult for other countries to cooperate with the Syrian government, and could potentially lead to Assad’s ouster. “I have continued to ask Secretary Kerry and others in the Administration—they have never said no, but they haven’t said yes—about this idea of establishing a Syrian war crimes tribunal,” a frustrated Smith said at the resolution markup on Wednesday. The resolution passed through the committee on a voice vote.

The only dissenting voice at the hearing was that of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who claimed that Assad is helping fight ISIS, America’s real enemy. He was quickly shut down.

Republicans have generally been skeptical of international prosecutions of accused war criminals. In 2002, George W. Bush signed the the American Servicemembers Protection Act, which shields American personnel and allies from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. Yet this position has softened. In 2013, President Obama signed a bill that would make it easier for the United States to go after war criminals like warlord Joseph Kony; the measure was spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and former chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

Smith’s approach would circumvent the ICC, which he chastised for only achieving two convictions in 14 years. His resolution would seek the creation of an ad hoc or regional tribunal. He pointed to similar tribunals in the former Yugoslavia (which convicted 67 people), Rwanda (26), and Sierra Leone (16). “Can a UN Security Council resolution establishing a Syrian war crimes tribunal prevail?” he asked. “I would respectfully submit yes.”

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Republicans Are Pushing Obama to Fill This Court…To Try Syrian War Crimes

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

by theacntnt1985-01 Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Less than two weeks after peace talks over the Syrian civil war abruptly ended, the International Syria Support Group—a body of about 20 countries and international organizations involved in the war, including the European Union and the United Nations—announced on Thursday that they had finally brokered the terms of a halt to the brutal war that has killed nearly half a million people. The “cessation of hostilities” between regime forces and rebel groups, if successful, would be the first general stop to the fighting in almost four years. It seemed to meet some of the Syrian opposition’s demands for humanitarian relief and a halt to Russian airstrikes against civilians and rebels. But none of this means the agreement is likely to succeed.

The International Syria Support Group group pledged its members would push “all parties to allow immediate and sustained humanitarian access to reach all people in need” and “take immediate steps to secure the full support of all parties to the conflict for a cessation of hostilities.” Those parties, however—the Syrian government and mainstream rebel groups—weren’t actually part of the negotiations. Thursday’s agreement merely sets the terms for how a cessation of hostilities would look, leaving the United States, Russia, Iran, and others to convince their allies on the ground to abide by the pact.

How exactly they’ll convince the regime and the opposition to play along hasn’t yet been decided; the declaration gives the ISSG a week to figure out the details of the agreement and implement them. “We will only be able to see whether this was a breakthrough in a few days,” admitted German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the announcement, which took place at a security conference in Munich. Secretary of State John Kerry also tempered expectations for the cessation agreement. “The real test is clearly whether or not all the parties honor those commitments and implement them in reality,” he said. “What I’ve said again and again is we cannot guarantee success in the outcome.”

The fact that the opposition’s High Negotiations Council, a body made up of dissident Syrian politicians and rebel leaders, is not taking part in the discussions in Munich means the agreement may not get crucial buy-in from armed groups on the battlefield. Such support is critical for political negotiations or agreements to hold.

The Washington Post reported that while rebels may accept the “ceasefire”—the United States and Russia are divided on whether to use the term—out of exhaustion and lack of options, they are still highly skeptical. “We no longer trust words. There have been too many recently, matched with opposite action on the ground from the Russians,” Issam Rayess, a spokesman for the rebels’ Southern Front coalition that fights near Damascus, told the Post‘s Liz Sly. “Within a week everything will have been destroyed,” one civilian told her. And no matter what the rebels decide, the agreement will also have no effect on jihadi groups like ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s homegrown affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The High Negotiations Council has adopted a wait-and-see approach. When the Geneva talks stopped earlier this month, the HNC said it would not return to the table until Russian airstrikes ended and humanitarian aid began flowing to starving and decimated areas of Syria. The United Nation’s Syria envoy hopes to restart the talks by February 25, and HNC spokesman Salim al-Muslat says the cessation of hostilities must actually take effect before the opposition returns to talks. “If we see action and implementation, we will see you very soon in Geneva,” he told reporters on Thursday.

But even if the fighting does stop for any significant length of time, the two sides are still no closer to agreeing on the most basic issue of the war: what to do with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The opposition and its backers will not accept any political solution that allows Assad to stay in office. But on the same day the cessation was announced, Assad told the French wire service AFP that he has no plans to give up any territory or power, instead reconfirming his intent to regain control of the entire country. “This is a goal we are seeking to achieve without any hesitation,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “It makes no sense for us to say that we will give up any part of Syria.” As Middle East analyst Brooklyn Middleton noted on Twitter, Assad’s statement means the cessation of hostilities will mostly be an illusion of progress rather than an actual achievement.

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

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10 of the Worst Cable News Moments of 2015

by HugoMcBrayer Posted on December 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Another year is about to pass, which means we’ve managed to survive 12 months of cable news—and endure some fantastically awful segments that the networks churned out. But that doesn’t mean we emerged unscathed! Whether it was calling the president of the United States a “pussy” on live television or relentlessly covering Donald Trump’s circuslike presidential campaign, cable news had plenty of lowlights in 2015. Here are some of the most memorable ones:

San Bernardino shooting
Days after the shooting in San Bernardino, California, several media outlets were able to get inside the home of the two suspected shooters—access that involved a crowbar and a cooperative landlord. Despite the questionable circumstances, reporters from a slew of networks, including CNN and MSNBC, swarmed the residence. The resulting circus of cable TV coverage even disturbed some network hosts.

“I’m having chills down my spine, what I’m seeing here,” said CNN security analyst Harry Houck, as reporters on the scene continued to film throughout the home. “This apartment is clearly full of evidence.”

At one point, an MSNBC reporter zoomed in on a driver’s license that likely belonged to one of the suspects’ relatives.

Insulting the president
A Fox News contributor abandoned every sense of decorum when he slammed President Barack Obama’s terrorism strategy and called him a “pussy” on live television. The network suspended him for two weeks, finally answering the question we’ve all wondered: “Just what does it take to get suspended from Fox News?”

Migrant crisis and Syrian refugees
The international effort to resettle Syrian refugees sparked widespread concern about how refugees are vetted when they seek to be admitted into the United States, particularly in light of the deadly attacks in Paris. Instead of taking time to explain the complex and rigorous process, cable news shows often appeared to inflame safety concerns with misleading portrayals of refugees escaping violence in Europe and the Middle East:

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Fox News also appeared to lend legitimacy to a biblical prophecy that some have used speculate that the Syrian crisis may signal the end of times. Watch the report on the “spooky passage” below:

Gun control and mass shootings
Amid calls to strengthen gun control laws and end the gun violence epidemic, Fox & Friends aired a segment about how to teach kids how to take down an active shooter with these self-defense skills:

Freddie Gray
When protests erupted in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore resident who died from a spinal cord injury while in police custody, CNN chose to ignore the demonstrations in favor of covering every second of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

If you were seeking coverage of the rallies, contributor Errol Louis suggested viewers could “find a live feed” somewhere else.

When the network did report on Gray later, CNN led one online story by describing Gray as the “son of an illiterate heroin addict.”

Donald Trump
There are myriad factors that have led to the rise of Donald Trump as a major GOP presidential candidate. The media’s insatiable appetite (including our own, at times) to cover his inflammatory campaign rhetoric is definitely one of them. On cable news, Trump was practically unavoidable.

After announcing his plan to bar all Muslims from entering the United States if elected president, a slew of cable news shows scrambled to talk to Trump about the proposal, which gave Trump a huge platform for his offensive ideas:

Leggings
In one of the creepier clips of the year, Fox News featured an all-male panel to opine on how a woman should dress in public. The clothing item in question was leggings. In the segment, the official “Panel of Fathers” ruminates over “lady parts” and whether they’re comfortable with the “women in their life parading in public with leggings, because they ain’t pants.”

“Guardian Angels”
In which Fox News, a news organization, lends legitimacy to this photo of a “guardian angel.”

Happy holidays!

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10 of the Worst Cable News Moments of 2015

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Donald Trump Says He’s Open to Requiring American Muslims to Carry Special IDs

by AlbertiGoin Posted on November 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Amid growing concern following last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, including calls from 30 governors to halt the relocation of Syrian refugees, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has taken things a step further.

In an interview with Yahoo, Trump explained that the United States would have to implement new and draconian strategies to protect the homeland.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he said. “And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

What type of unthinkable things is Trump—who has also floated the idea of shuttering certain mosques—proposing? He says he’s potentially open to the creation of a database to track Muslim citizens, or requiring that Muslim Americans carry a special form of identification noting their faith.

It is worth pointing out that of the 745,000 refugees resettled in the United States since the September 11 terrorist attacks, only two have been arrested on terrorism-related charges, and in that case they were allegedly trying to aid Al Qaeda in Iraq.

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Donald Trump Says He’s Open to Requiring American Muslims to Carry Special IDs

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

by EdwardJvu5943469 Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was quick to blame President Obama’s handling of ISIS and the current migrant crisis swelling Europe. On Saturday, he topped his usual blend of hateful xenophobia by suggesting Syrian refugees be placed in the neighborhoods of “limousine liberals” such as Hillary Clinton.

“How come they never end up in the neighborhood where the limousine liberal lives?” Huckabee said in a radio interview. “Behind gated communities and with armed security around. Mrs. Clinton, you have suggested we take in 65,00 refugees. How many can we bring to your neighborhood in Chappaqua?”

The former Arkansas governor continued by connecting two seemingly disparate events and belittling the protests that erupted at the University of Missouri last week over allegations of racism on campus.

“Heck, we may take them to the University of Missouri,” Huckabee continued. “A lot of the students are so stressed out from feeling unsafe because somebody said a word they didn’t like that they are not using their dorm rooms anymore. Maybe we can put them there.”

Since the deadly attacks on Friday, Republican politicians have been vowing to slam the door on the Obama administration’s plan to accept refugees fleeing from violence in Syria and the Middle East. Concerns over the screening process have been heightened after a Syrian passport was located near the body of one of the Paris attackers.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey on Monday, President Obama hit back at Republicans’ growing refusal to take in refugees, calling their rejections a “betrayal of our values.”

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

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Can Republican Governors Block Syrian Refugees From Settling in Their States?

by RacheleODowd Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of last Friday’s attacks in Paris, Republican governors across the country have made their positions clear—they want nothing to do with the Syrians fleeing ISIS. On Sunday, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley announced that his state won’t accept any Syrian refugees. On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence followed suit. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order to halt the flow of Syrian refugees to his state (it has accepted 14).

Even Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who had previously called welcoming refugees “part of being a good Michigander,” announced he was suspending his work with the federal government on bringing Syrians to his state. “Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” he said in a statement. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”

What Snyder and his Republicans haven’t explained is how they could legally do this. Refugee resettlement is a federal responsibility in which states have historically had only an advisory role. The Department of Homeland Security screens applicants. The State Department places them in new communities by working with a network of nonprofits on the ground. And the the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement works with refugees to make the transition in their new communities. (Here’s a chart if you’re confused.)

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner told reports Monday that the government would listen to the concerns of local officials, but it would not take a position on the legality of the governors’ decrees or even say whether a governor could erect checkpoints to vet potential refugees entering their states. “Whether they can legally do that, I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “I don’t. I think our lawyers are looking at that.”

But other experts are more emphatic. “They don’t have the legal authority to stop resettlement in their states—much less to stop the presence of a legally authorized individual based on nationality,” says Jen Smyers, associate director for immigration and refugee policy at the Church World Service, an international nonprofit that does refugee resettlement. If a family of Syrian refugees decides they want to move in with their relatives in Michigan (a hub for Muslim and Christian immigrants from the Middle East) there’s nothing Rick Snyder can do to stop them. “There are really clear discrimination protections against saying someone can’t be in your state depending on where you’re from,” Smyers notes.

Nor do the states have much have much power of the purse as far as refugee resettlement is concerned. The work of resettlement is handled by a network of public-private partnerships, and the public money comes from the federal level. In some cases, the federal dollars are diverted through state governments, but they’re merely a pass-through. “If they were to hold up that fund, there would certainly be legal ramifications,” Smyers says. Simply put, if these Republicans really want to block refugees from entering their states, they are asking for a fight.

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Can Republican Governors Block Syrian Refugees From Settling in Their States?

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President Obama Calls Rejection of Syrian Refugees a "Betrayal of Our Values"

by KimHeiden4411 Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama said on Monday morning that the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 people on Friday should not affect the small intake of Syrian refugees into the United States. “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values,” he said during remarks at the G20 economic summit in Antalya, Turkey.

The comments were a direct rebuke to the governors of Alabama and Michigan, who announced over the weekend that their states would no longer resettle Syrian refugees because of security concerns. They were joined by the governors of Texas and Arkansas on Monday morning. While no Syrians have settled in Alabama since the start of the country’s uprising in 2011, Michigan is home to a large Arab and Middle Eastern community and at least 200 Syrians have found homes there, according to data compiled by the New York Times. That number was likely to rise after the Obama administration’s announcement in September that the US would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, a nearly tenfold increase in the number of Syrians who have settled here since 2012.

Obama also took a clear swipe at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom said on Sunday that the US should focus on taking in Christian refugees rather than Muslims. Their comments echoed those of Eastern European leaders who pushed back against accepting refugees over the summer by saying their countries weren’t prepared to accept Muslims. “When I heard political leaders suggest that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing a warn-torn country is admitted…that’s shameful,” Obama said, growing visibly heated. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

Opponents of refugee resettlement have called for more stringent security checks on Syrians to make sure they have no connections to ISIS or other terrorist groups, but Syrians currently undergo a lengthy screening process that resettlement experts say is already sufficient to uncover terrorist ties. “Refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States,” wrote Danna Van Brandt, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, in an email to Mother Jones. “Screening includes the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense.”

A Syrian passport bearing the name Ahmed Almuhamed was found near the remains of a suicide bomber at Paris’ Stade de France on Friday night. The passport was used by a refugee who entered Greece just six weeks ago, stoking fears that ISIS members may be using the refugee crisis as cover. But Syrian passports, both stolen and forged, are popular on the black market, and it’s still unknown if Almuhamed himself was the bomber. Obama cautioned on Monday about drawing quick links between terrorist groups and refugees. “It’s very important that…we do not close our hearts or these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism,” he said.

Obama also fielded several questions about his strategy in Syria, which he defended as the only “sustainable” strategy available to the United States. While he said there will be an “intensification” of the current US actions, which include a long-running bombing campaign against ISIS and the recent deployment of special operations soldiers to northern Syria, he rejected any possibility that the US will deploy a large ground force to take on ISIS. “It is not just my view, but the view of my closest military and civilian advisors, that that would be a mistake,” he said. “We would see a repetition of what we’ve see before: If you do not have local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremists, that they resurface unless you’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

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President Obama Calls Rejection of Syrian Refugees a "Betrayal of Our Values"

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Here Are the Most Horrible Tweets About the Paris Tragedy

by BethanyKier Posted on November 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here are some of the worst reactions we’ve seen so far to the tragedy in Paris. Follow our breaking news reporting on the attacks here.

Donald J. Trump had retweeted this one.

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Here Are the Most Horrible Tweets About the Paris Tragedy

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America Once Accepted 800,000 War Refugees. Is it Time to Do That Again?

by DebLangton Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the refugee crisis in Europe worsening dramatically, the Obama administration announced on Thursday that it would accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. That’s a significant step: Over the past four years, as millions of Syrians have been displaced by a brutal civil war, the United States has admitted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees. But humanitarian advocates say President Barack Obama’s move doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The US offer “is cold comfort to the victims of the Syrian conflict,” said International Rescue Committee president David Miliband in a press release Friday. “With 4 million living in limbo and tens of thousands making desperate choices to reach safety, the US has a moral responsibility to lead and is fully equipped to respond in a far more robust way.” Part of the solution, experts argue, is for the United States to help organize a program to send refugees to developed countries around the world. After all, they point out, we’ve done it before.

“This is not science fiction,” said Francois Crepeau, the United Nations’s special rapporteur for the human rights of migrants. “We resettled almost 2 million Indochinese 40 years ago. We can do it again.”

After the end of the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of people attempted to flee Southeast Asia, mostly from Vietnam, by riding rickety, overloaded boats to nearby countries. Those countries, like many European countries during the current crisis, felt overwhelmed by the unyielding and disorganized flow of people arriving on their shores. They eventually announced that they would refuse to take in any more “boat people,” prompting the international community to create a global resettlement program with the help of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR ultimately resettled 1.3 million Southeast Asians in countries around the world, including more than 800,000 in the United States.

Vietnamese refugees watch as a Thai Marine police boat casts them adrift in the Gulf of Siam after being turned away on November 30, 1977. They had escaped earlier in November from Vietnam to what they thought would be freedom, but Thai police refused to allow them to come ashore. Eddie Adams/AP

Tugboats load water onto the refugee ship Tung An at its anchorage in Manila Bay on December 28, 1978. The Philippines had declared that the more than 2,300 Vietnamese “boat people” aboard could not go ashore. The United States eventually accepted some of the ship’s refugees. AH/AP

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Two million is now about the number that Crepeau thinks should be resettled today across the “global north”—essentially the European Union, plus the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “Two million refugees resettled over five years means 400,000 per year,” he said. “Four hundred thousand per year divided by 32 countries representing 850 million inhabitants is not much.”

That’s still a small fraction of the nearly 12 million people exiled or internally displaced by the war in Syria, not to mention the significant number of people fleeing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq or repression in Eritrea and other countries. “It’s going to be a small percentage. I don’t see any way it’s not going to be that,” acknowledged Larry Yungk, a senior resettlement officer with the UNHCR. “That being said, we have always said that we need more resettlement places, whether it’s for Syrians or globally. And the Syrian conflict, I think, has shown why we need more places.”

Finding those places has been particularly difficult in Europe. Yungk praised the “very generous response” of Germany, which expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year, but several other EU countries are openly hostile to accepting refugees. The government of Denmark ran newspaper ads in Lebanon telling Syrian refugees they’re not welcome in the Scandinavian country. Hungary has subjected migrants to humiliating treatment, even as it builds a border fence to stop the influx. Such countries helped block a mandatory refugee quota system for EU members in May, and Germany’s efforts to try again are meeting with little success.

A Syrian man swims in front of a dinghy full of refugees that suffered engine failure as they approached Lesbos island, Greece, on September 11, 2015.

Yungk, who spoke with Mother Jones prior to the administration’s announcement on Thursday, isn’t optimistic that the United States will ultimately admit a dramatically higher number of people for resettlement. Not only is the United States far from the Middle East, where the bulk of the refugees are, but its system for investigating and approving refugees is already heavily taxed. The United States takes in about 70,000 refugees from across the world every year. But the 1,500 Syrians granted refugee status so far are just a small fraction of the 18,000 or so Syrian cases that the UNHCR has submitted to the US government.

“Our goal is to try to work with the United States to reduce that gap,” Yungk said. “If we do, then the ability is there to talk, I think, about more referrals. And the United States will be probably more willing to look at it.” The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

But even if the United States doesn’t accept a large number of refugees—the 10,000 that will now be allowed into the United States is about half the number of refugees who arrived in Munich from Hungary last weekend—merely taking action could help convince other nations to pitch in. “Yes, it would be nice to resettle some more refugees today,” said James Hathaway, the director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan. “But the important thing that they should be doing is leading—not a new refugee convention, but a new mechanism to share the responsibilities of protection around the world. The US needs to show leadership on that.”

Pressure is growing on the United States to do more. In May, a group of 14 Senate Democrats wrote a letter urging the Obama administration to accept up 65,000 Syrians. A coalition of American groups including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and the International Rescue Committee is now calling for the United States to take in up to 100,000 Syrians. Even GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has come out in support of expanded resettlement in the United States. But even if the magnitude of the refugee crisis has prompted some change, large-scale progress will be much harder.

“If you do go back to some of the big situations like Bosnia and Southeast Asia, what you did see is, frankly, a coalition of countries all coming together to say, ‘We’ll do this,'” Yungk said. “So that’s what it would take.”

Max J. Rosenthal is reporting from Berlin as part of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, a two-month reporting program in Germany run by the International Center for Journalists. Gabrielle Canon contributed reporting to this article from San Francisco.

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America Once Accepted 800,000 War Refugees. Is it Time to Do That Again?

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