The civil war in Syria has been a disaster with the country torn between the repressive regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Syrian rebel groups, and ISIS. As the violence continues; the death toll keeps rising. A recent U.S. airstrike resulted in 60 civilian deaths, including children, in a failed bid to take down ISIS targets. Now the head of the CIA, John Brennan, is expressing fear that the country will never recover from a conflict like this.
According to Al Jazeera, Brennan didn’t see hope for an intact Syria with the way things are currently going:
“I don’t know whether or not Syria can be put back together again,” he said on Friday at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
“There’s been so much blood spilled, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get back to [a unified Syria] in my life time.”
Around 400,000 people have died in the conflict, which has been going on since 2011. Eleven million people have been displaced in the conflict, and the country has already been effectively divided up by various factions. Peace talks are currently at an impasse over whether to impose federalism in Syria, with the country having a central government while also giving power to regional autonomous governments, or to divide up the country in order to end the conflict. Brennan seemed to point to the latter as being inevitable, while U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry feared that the conflict would come to partition as well, and said so back in February.
The Syrian conflict has also caused a refugee crisis, which has motivated some U.S. politicians to speak out against “the mass immigration” of Syrians to America. This conflict has had far-reaching ramifications for the world, which might not let up soon if something doesn’t change.
(via Al Jazeera)