Was the United Kingdom right to back the opposition to the Assad regime? The director of Scotland’s Catholic aid and development agency launches an excoriating attack on British foreign policy in Syria

A year ago Moscow and Ankara were apparently at loggerheads, Turkey having just shot down a Russian plane that had ventured into its airspace. Today, they look like the peace brokers of the Middle East, having moved in to fill the vacuum in international leadership in the civil war in Syria.

The ceasefire that these two countries brokered late in December was unanimously approved by a resolution in the United Nations Security Council. Thankfully, it appears to be more or less holding. But what is urgently needed now is a permanent peace agreement. And that will need the backing of all the major international players involved in the conflict in Syria, including the United Kingdom.
Over the last six years, the war in Syria has killed 400,000 people. Nearly 12 million have been driven from their homes, almost 5 million of them fleeing over international borders to seek sanctuary as refugees, the vast majority still in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and the other surrounding countries. The human cost has been colossal; the psychological harm, to children and adults alike, deep and enduring; and the strain on services and infrastructure in the surrounding countries, crippling.