A Look at The Acceptance of Immigrants from Syria

Accepting Syrian Refugees

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights 206,923 civilians have been killed during the span of Syria’s civil war. It is estimated by the SNHR that 57% of these deaths are due to aerial bombardment. Those that are lucky enough to live through the air raids experience many after-effects, the largest one being P.T.S.D. If they so happen to be injured during the bombings they would be forced to try and make it to one of few makeshift hospitals located around Syria. During all of this there have been countries who refuse to take in any refugees. If these nations were to openly accept Syrian civilians trying to escape death we would almost immediately see a decline in the death toll.

Airstrikes are a common form of death when living in Syria. There is believed to be a total of 8,052 airstrikes on Syrian soil in which airwars says it is going up daily. Airwars also states that with these 8,000+ airstrikes there have also been a total of 76,649 bombs and missiles dropped. An airstrikes is considered any form of attack that requires the use of an aircraft. Before an airstrikes launches there are steps that must be thought through before any advancements. Sharon Weinberger explains that there are six steps the U.S. and other coalition countries use before initiating these strikes.

Step one is “Objectives, Effects, and Guidance” (Weinberger, “How it Works: A U.S. Military Airstrike”). According to Sharon these are actually three separate steps, but all equivalent in a linked area. Many people believe that an airstrike is as simple as picking a target and destroying it, but that is not the case. There are planners that determine what goals these strikes are looking to achieve. Once these goals are found they must determine how to proceed to have the effect they want. Weinberger says that step two is “Target Development” this is when a group of people create a list of targets using reports from outside sources in order to find out the potential for any collateral or innocent civilians that may be killed or injured. For the past several months airstrikes from coalition and Russia have been ignoring this step, taking numerous lives in the process.

Sharon named step three “Weaponeering and Allocation”. This is where another team of analysts review the amount of weaponry needed to get the job done. The bigger the job the larger the weapons, smaller jobs need less weapons. This will devise the “perfect” plan for airstrikes. Step four is explained by Sharon as “Air Tasking Order Production and Dissemination”. Simply put this is just the submission of all instructions from prior steps sent to current allies in the area. The previous step is just a preliminary in order to make way for step five and six, Sharon has named them “Execution Planning and Assessment”. Execution planning is just the pilot taking off and completing the mission that he was assigned. Assessment is just created to see if they accomplished what they set out to achieve. These are the steps to a successful airstrike, sadly a few of them have been overlooked every so often.

There are many countries that bring in Syrian refugees and others that avoid harboring any due to the economic problems that may occur. Those that are refusing to help these innocent civilians are in turn letting them die. If countries were to bring in a few more Syrian citizens we would have a lot less death on our hands as opposed to what is currently happening. When there are less innocents in Syria there are less lives to put at risk during airstrikes. The main targets of many of the coalition strikes have been terrorist organizations like The K.G.B or I.S.I.S. problem with this being that many of the cities that these organizations are found in contain many civilians stuck between a rock and a hard place. The proposal of having countries take in a few civilians will make it easier for these airstrikes to continue, with a lower chance of civilian casualties we can see a higher amount of coalition bombs with less devastating consequences. Some places like Germany have 300,000 refugees, but other places like the U.S. will only take 10,000, even then some states won’t allow any in (Jon Stone, “Syrian refugee crisis: How different countries have responded”).

If we were to increase the amount of refugees per country most of the Syrian problems would be minimized. With a lack of civilians roaming many of the terrorist infiltrated cities there will be less worry. Airstrikes will be more effective as there will be less in the way of taking down the actual target. The death toll of Syria would decrease as there aren’t people to kill between these strikes, the government, and terrorists meaning that more lives will be saved. Daily the people of Syria live in fear as they are unsure of whether or not it will be their last day on Earth, no one should have to live with that type of fear.