Comment: The West has been bombing Syria longer than you might think Published on: 25 April 2018 Writing for The Conversation, Dr Craig Jones discusses how the US, UK, France and others have been involved in a bombing campaign in Syria for a number of years. In to the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons in the city of Douma on April 7 2018, the US, the UK and France recently launched missile strikes against targets in the cities of Damascus and Homs. The coalition fired around 100 missiles in total, reportedly destroying key chemical weapons research and production facilities. The ensuing domestic and international debates about have largely neglected an arguably much more important fact: in one way or another, the US, the UK and France – and many countries besides – have been involved in a concerted bombing campaign in Syria since 2014. In 2012, President Barack Obama that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria would be “a red line for us”. Almost exactly a year later, Syria launched a brutal chemical attack in Ghouta, killing . Obama promised a response, but not without Congressional authorisation, which was not forthcoming. When the British House of Commons then Prime Minister David Cameron’s motion to intervene in Syria, it seemed to take the wind out of Obama’s sails. Instead of military action, the West opted instead to endorse a Russian-brokered plan to remove and destroy the Syrian government’s chemical weapons stocks. According to the US Department of Defence, the arsenal was within a year. There would be no military intervention, for now. But things changed in June 2014, when the so-called Islamic State (IS) seized control of Mosul and other cities in Iraq and . This time the US moved swiftly, and by August 2014 was conducting airstrikes on IS targets. Most of the initial strikes were focused on Iraq, but the bombs followed the terrorist group as it captured territories in Syria. What began as a series of ad hoc US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria soon turned into something much more. In October 2014, the US established the , a coalition with a to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS. In December 2015, just a year after voting against military action against the Assad regime, the UK’s House of Commons against IS in Syria. Bombing together Now well into its fourth year, Operation Inherent Resolve consists of , including all and many local forces on the ground and in the region. Thirteen of these coalition members are bombing in Syria, the air forces of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and the Assad government. The UK plays a key role in the coalition and is in terms of the number of airstrikes it has conducted in Iraq and Syria. Airwars.org, a not-for-profit transparency “both at tracking and archiving international military actions in conflict zones such as Iraq, Syria and Libya”, has been tracking the coalition bombing campaign since it began in 2014. Its reports are an important reminder that there is an extensive and concerning recent history to the bombing of Syria. As of August 9 2017, Operation Inherent Resolve had conducted 13,331 strikes in Iraq and . According to the US Air Force, the coalition has fired well over as part of the operation. That’s a lot of bombs by any measure – but especially concerning is the fact that they have caused a high number of civilian casualties. A Royal Canadian CF-188 Hornet takes part in Operation Inherent Resolve. Airwars found that between August 8 2014 and March 31 2018, civilians are “likely to have died in coalition actions”. The organisation urges caution with these numbers because of the significant challenges of casualty verification, but their rigorous methodology classifies these as a combination of “confirmed” and “likely”. The coalition itself that as of March 2018, at least 855 civilians have been killed as a result of its operations, but it is currently investigating over 500 more reports of civilian casualties. The US and UK pride themselves on their commitment to minimise civilian casualties, but warfare inevitably carries the risk that civilians will be killed. Neta C. Crawford, a political scientist at Boston University and director of the , put it : “How Many Iraqi and Syrian civilians is it acceptable for the US to put at risk of injury or death in air strikes against IS militants?” This is not an easy question to answer, but it points to an inevitable cost of the ongoing bombing campaigns in Syria and beyond. This cost is seldom discussed outside of a small group of concerned organisations, but it should surely factor into any future decisions about bombing Syria – or indeed, anywhere else. The people of Syria have now endured eight years of devastating war. It’s true that the Syrian regime is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the death and destruction, with Russia and Iran complicit thanks to their support for Assad. In terms of civilians killed, Russia’s track record of bombing in Syria is than the US-led coalition’s; indeed, it’s probably . But that doesn’t imply that the US-led bombing campaign in Syria was born out of some humanitarian concern for the people of Syria, or a desire to stop the Syrian regime from using its chemical weapons and barrel bombs. It was born of an imperative to halt IS’s steady advance and ultimately destroy it. The UK government its latest strikes as an attempt to alleviate the “extreme humanitarian suffering of the Syrian people”, but this is certainly not what convinced the West to start bombing Syria in the first place. If gross humanitarian suffering is what’s at issue here, the coalition’s nearly four years of aerial strikes deserve serious scrutiny too. , Lecturer in Political Geography, This article was originally published on . Read the . 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