1 Idlib, Syria I think it''s important to start by saying that even in the most dire situations, it is possible to make a difference. And when the stakes are life and death, even a small difference can be tremendously important. One of the biggest challenges we faced during my time at Human Rights Watch was trying to stop the slaughter of civilians in Syria. The enormity of the problem required initiative and persistence to build enough pressure to have an impact. After brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in early 2011 yielded an armed conflict, Syria became synonymous with mass atrocities. The carnage was so awful that it was a central focus of Human Rights Watch and a personal preoccupation for me. Despite the magnitude of the challenge, we helped to curtail this unspeakable cruelty. Throughout the fighting, the Syrian government ripped up the rule book--international humanitarian law--that is designed to spare civilians the hazards of war.

Instead, it targeted civilians. It dropped barrel bombs on them (oil drums filled with explosives and shrapnel to maximize damage), deployed chemical weapons against them, starved them, and forcibly disappeared, tortured, and executed them. It was an appalling, deliberate effort to defeat an insurgency by using war crimes and atrocities. To better understand the horrors unfolding, I periodically visited Gaziantep, the Turkish city known as a sister of Syria''s Aleppo. During my visits, Gaziantep was the hub for humanitarian operations in rebel-held northwestern Syria. I spoke with refugee families, orphans, humanitarian workers, and especially doctors, who were impressively trying to provide health care in very dangerous circumstances. I became deeply concerned about their plight and the fate of the people they were trying to serve. The doctors vividly described the dreadful conditions of life under the Syrian government.

One anesthesiologist who had been serving in the military told me of having been forced to sedate sixty-three people in detention when the United Nations-Arab League special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, visited Idlib in 2012. The purpose was to silence them and make it easier to hide from Brahimi their shackles and wounds from torture and medical neglect. He found the experience so unbearable that he fled to opposition territory. An internist with whom I stayed in Gaziantep described working late at night after his regular job in Aleppo to see patients in secret clinics, who feared arrest if they appeared at a government-run facility. He also fled. Three of his students were arrested and killed for having worked with him. I couldn''t help but be appalled by these stories and determined to do my part to try to ease this suffering. Even though international humanitarian law protected the hospitals in opposition areas where these doctors worked, they were a favorite target of Syrian forces and their Russian allies.

One vascular surgeon described desperately trying to stop the bleeding of patients after their hospital had been bombed. The doctors moved some hospitals underground to hide and protect them, but those, too, were attacked. When the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) persuaded reluctant doctors and humanitarian organizations to provide the coordinates of their hidden hospitals, naively hoping that it might deter the attacks, the Syrian and Russian militaries targeted them more precisely. Nearly one thousand medical workers--doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers--were killed. Despite the support of troops sent by Iran and its allied Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had lost large swaths of the country to rebel forces and was stuck in a military stalemate. That changed in September 2015, when President Vladimir Putin sent the Russian military. Government forces gradually retook much of the country, including the rebel-held enclaves of eastern Aleppo in 2016 and Eastern Ghouta in 2018. Alas, the Russian military only intensified Assad''s war-crime strategy.

Syria''s Idlib province, in the northwestern part of the country, and a few surrounding bits of territory became the last area still controlled by armed forces opposing the government. By 2020, three million civilians lived in Idlib, roughly half having been forcibly displaced from elsewhere in Syria. Many of the displaced had lived in areas under siege by the Syrian army. When these areas fell, they were given the choice of living under Assad''s ruthless rule or boarding his notorious green buses to be shipped to Idlib. Many chose Idlib. At least one million civilians were crowded into camps, described as "sites of last resort," along the border with Turkey. As the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey mounted toward 3.5 million, the Turkish government gradually closed its border.

The civilians in Idlib were subject to regular bombardment by Syrian and Russian planes and helicopters. Those bombers deliberately targeted schools, markets, and apartment buildings, as well as hospitals, as Human Rights Watch''s investigation and reporting showed. Pursuing the classic, if criminal, counterinsurgency strategy of draining the sea to catch the fish, the attackers'' aim was to chase civilians from Idlib to make it easier for Syrian troops to recapture the territory from the rebel forces living among them. During one of my visits to Gaziantep, a Syrian doctor from a hospital in Idlib told me, referring to the United Nations secretary-general through the end of 2016, "We''re tired of always hearing Ban Ki-moon say that he is ''concerned'' or ''shocked'' " by the bombing of civilians in Syria. I fully understood his frustration, but the fault hardly lay with Ban. Russia''s and China''s vetoes had paralyzed the UN Security Council, and no nation offered much beyond occasional expressions of outrage. Human Rights Watch began as we always did--we investigated, documented, and reported on these war crimes. The first point of such reporting is to shame the perpetrators.

Because most governments claim to uphold human rights, we can tarnish their reputations--and generate pressure for change--by spotlighting their abusive conduct. The difficulty in the case of Syria was that Assad, already willing to do whatever it took to cling to power in what he saw as a life-and-death struggle, had little reputation left to lose. He sometimes tried to cover up his atrocities, but they were often meticulously recorded and publicized--by opposition Syrian videographers who posted their work on YouTube, a commission of inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council (the world''s top multilateral body on human rights), as well as Human Rights Watch and allied organizations. Showing that he was bombing civilians in Idlib, as he had bombed civilians in many other parts of Syria, was not going to be enough to end his war crimes. Putin was another story. Now that Putin has committed similar atrocities in Ukraine to avoid a defeat that would jeopardize his rule, he has moved closer to Assad''s realm of shamelessness. But at the time, Putin tried to maintain an aura of respectability. He did not want to be seen as a war criminal.

That gave us leverage, as I outlined in July 2018 in an article in the New York Review of Books. Knowing that the Syrian military needed Russian support and that the Russian government was susceptible to pressure, we decided to focus on Putin. We knew that shameful publicity alone would not be enough. We would need to combine it, as we so often did, with pressure from sympathetic governments. We focused on Germany and France, as the two most important members of the European Union, and Turkey, because of its significant interest in northern Syria and its respectful relations with Russia. I also spoke with an official from Iran, a key political and military ally of Assad. Behind each of these efforts were years of outreach and relationship building. Turkey was a difficult interlocutor because Human Rights Watch regularly reported on and criticized the increasingly autocratic rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

We had also reported for years on the violent abuses of his predecessors. Yet some officials maintained a degree of independence and were receptive to speaking with Human Rights Watch and hearing us out on Syria. We had numerous sober, businesslike meetings over the years with senior Turkish officials. Sometimes the meetings paralleled my visits to Gaziantep, which reinforced for me the enormous stakes. I was often accompanied by Emma Sinclair-Webb, Human Rights Watch''s researcher for Turkey--a Brit who spoke beautiful Turkish and knew the country extraordinarily well. One deputy prime minister took copious notes as we spoke in Ankara in January 2016, as if he did not want to forget a single word. The same month, I met with Turkey''s then prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, after a late-night dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In September 2018, Emma and I saw the deputy foreign minister in Ankara.

In October 2019, I held a long and remarkably candid conversation with a senior Turkish security official at a Munich Security Conference meeting in Doha, Qatar. After the flight of more than one million refugees to Europe in 2015, most crossing by raft or small boat from Turkey to nearby Greek islands, the European Union paid the Turkish government 6 billion euros to stop further refugees from leaving. Turkish officials told me that if the loss of civilian life in Syria became too high, it would again allow Syrians to flee, but that was not the same as stopping the slaughter. In Ankara in September 2018, I met with a large group of Western ambass.