On August 30, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian commented on the Syrian government’s that the United States, terrorist groups and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) “have conducted illegal activities such as stealing and destruction” since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011.
Zhao accused the U.S. of “plundering in Syria” and taking more than 80% of the country’s oil production, a false allegation that Polygraph.info has previously debunked. Both and have made similar bogus claims.
Zhao blamed Syria’s war on the U.S., claiming Washington hoped to “to start a color revolution.”
“Its frequent military interventions in Syria have caused great civilian casualties and inestimable economic loss, and displaced more than 12 million people,” he said.
That is a false characterization that whitewashes years of brutalities by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Russian military forces allied with his regime. Let's look back.
What began in March 2011 as popular and peaceful protests against Assad, calling for more freedoms, democratic reform and an end to corruption, quickly escalated. Assad ordered deadly attacks on protesters, prompting the opposition to take up arms.
Since then, the conflict has been complicated by varying degrees of foreign involvement. Russia and Iran backed the Assad regime, while the United States, with allies that included Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, supported opposition forces.
Non-state actors, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and the Kremlin-linked mercenary company Wagner Group, also aided the Assad regime. Extremist jihadist groups, including Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida, took advantage of the chaos and joined the fighting with their own aims.
In short, over 11 years of conflict, many actors took part in the fighting, not just the U.S.
The conflict has killed more than 306,000 civilians and displaced more than 12 million Syrians, according to the United Nations. In ruins and still enduring war, Syria has experienced economic deterioration, extreme poverty, hunger, the COVID-19 pandemic and the destruction of vital infrastructure to meet basic humanitarian needs.
The U.N. in July that 14.6 million people in needed humanitarian assistance, a 9 percent increases from last year.
While all parties to the conflict, the U.S.-led coalition included, have been accused of human rights violations and war crimes, the Assad regime and its key ally Russia have by far perpetrated most of the violence against civilians and caused widespread destruction as a matter of strategy.
As writer Zachary Laub wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations:
Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria in 2015 turned the tide of the war in favor of the Assad regime, prolonging the fighting.
Assad’s forces were repeatedly accused of using chemical weapons against civilians, including the Ghouta chemical attack in , the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, a town in rebel-held Idlib province and the Douma chemical attack in .
“While all sides to the conflict have committed heinous laws-of-war violations, the Syrian-Russian military alliance has conducted indiscriminate aerial bombing of schools, hospitals, and markets – the civilian infrastructure essential to a society’s survival,” Human Rights Watch in a 2022 report on Syria.
, a British monitoring group, the Russian air force launched more than 45,000 airstrikes from September 2015 to September 2019, “many targeting civilian areas and infrastructure, according to observers.” The group in September 2021 that about 23,000 civilians had been killed in Syria as a result of Russian military actions since 2015.
A U.N. Commission of Inquiry said in a March 2020 that Russian forces were directly involved in attacks on civilian targets, such as medical facilities and markets, and called those attacks war crimes.
The report, covering July 2019 to January 2020, focused on in which evidence of Russian involvement was discovered.
Airstrikes on a market in northern Syria on July 22, 2019, killed 43 civilians, including four children, and wounded at least 109 people. Rescue workers who rushed to the site were also targeted. On August 16, 2019, airstrikes hit a compound for displaced civilians in Idlib province, killing 20 people, including eight women and six children, and injuring 40.