US has not done much for Syrian refugees: Expert

By Beyza Binnur Donmez

ANKARA (AA) - Despite causing a lot of the displacement in Syria with its military inaction, the U.S. has not done much for civilians of a civil war as it enters its ninth year, a Syrian-American expert said.

The head of the Washington-based Omran Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank on Syrian issues, told Anadolu Agency the U.S. has taken nearly 22,000 Syrian refugees during the war, citing data by the Syria Community Network.

Ammar Kahf said it is a "very, very small" amount considering the ability of the country.

"They actually do not take good care of refugees, so even 10,000 of them still suffer and don't have a job or way to survive," he said. "So do I think they've done enough? No, they have not.”

Kahf said Washington failed to "help enough" financially to other countries creating solutions to the crisis, adding "the U.S. was part of the reason for a lot of the displacement that took place because of its inaction and inability to act upon the saving of lives that were bombed."

He said in terms of population, Canada has accepted more Syrian refugees than the U.S. in percent-wise and has done "a lot of good" social programs compared to America.

- Trump vs Obama administration on Syrian crisis

Saying that there are no sharp differences between the former and current U.S. administrations toward their approaches to the refugee crisis, Kahf said the Trump administration at least has a "coherent" policy and team on Syria.

"[U.S. President Donald] Trump is very business oriented where he wants to fix a file at a time without looking at the big picture. But in a very systematic, very concise way where they have a Syria team that is coherent," he said. "The Obama administration didn't have a coherent team, didn't have a coherent policy, regardless of whether the policies right or wrong, but at least the Trump administration has a policy that they've been following, or he has been following and pushing through, and sending up the team around him to serve that policy."

He said former President Barack Obama's approach to Syria was more about "continuing and empowering Iran in the region, allowing the Russians to continue to expand their presence within the entire region, not just Syria, to postpone, contain and avoid any action or serious action."

Both governments have not served refugee rights and refugee displacement, he said.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by the Syrian regime and its allies Iran and Russia, and more than 10 million others displaced, according to UN officials.

In late 2015, the first American ground troops entered Syria to fight against Daesh/ISIS terrorists in the region and has since kept a presence.

Trump slammed the Obama administration’s Syria policy and its close alliance with the YPG-PKK terror group at the expense of NATO-ally Turkey, and later in 2019 agreed to pull out American troops from Turkey’s southern Syrian border for the planned safe zone pressed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since 2015.

However, the Trump administration's hardline policies against any form of immigration since the very beginning negatively affected the number of Syrian refugees accepted into the country.

Currently, Turkey hosts nearly 4 million Syrian refugees, while Lebanon and Jordan has over a million respectively.

Iran, Russia and most of the Western countries, despite playing a major role in the instability and devastation of Syria to advance their national interests, gravely failed to protect the civilian victims of the ravaging war.