Jordan, which currently chairs the 15-member United Nations Security Council, has led on a resolution that humanitarian aid be allowed into the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk to the south of Damascus. It is a demand which, however, bears little relationship with the facts on the ground. It is also, moreover, one more example of the deplorable way in which the international community has wrung its hands over the horrors that have been taking place in Syria for more than four years, without once willing the means to do anything to stop them. The situation of those Palestinians who remain in the Yarmouk camp is indeed perilous. The camp, which was set up in 1948, once had a population of 150,000. Now it is estimated that there are only 18,000 Palestinians still living there in what a UN official has claimed are “inhumane conditions”. The urgent need is to get food and medicine to Yarmouk occupants. But there seems little chance of that happening since the greater part of the two-square-kilometer camp has been taken over by fighters of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) in a rapid advance that appears to have caught the Palestinians by surprise. Daesh is not about to cooperate with anybody to let in food and medicine. Moreover, the conflict is intensely confused. Palestinians are reportedly fighting alongside Free Syrian Army troops to hold back the terrorists. Meanwhile, the Assad regime's troops and its feared Shabiha militia have apparently stayed out of the street fighting, contenting themselves with artillery and mortar fire onto Daesh positions. Assad's abandonment of the camp is a typical betrayal, given that in 2012 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the dominant Hamas-linked group within Yarmouk, actually fought for Assad against the Free Syrian Army. By the same measure, the FSA's support for the embattled Palestinians against the Daesh scourge is honorable as well as tactical. The camp is just eight kilometers from the center of Damascus. When it was built after the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians, it was well outside the boundaries of the capital. But the city has since expanded to embrace Yarmouk, even though it has always been carefully isolated. The regime's holding back from joining the fray is no puzzle. Assad clearly hopes that the FSA and Daesh will slaughter each other and it does not matter what happens to the Palestinians. It is yet another example of the regime's cynical schemes designed to promote maximum bloodshed among its opponents, as it tries to cling desperately to power. It may, however, have miscalculated. If Daesh gains control of Yarmouk, the head of the snake will have arrived uncomfortably close to Assad's presidential palace. Over and above his scheme to have the FSA and the Palestinians fighting and dying for him, Assad is of course relying on airstrikes from the US and its allies to degrade Daesh in the territory it has seized in Iraq and Syria. But he is equally hopeful that Daesh terrorists will also be attacking the FSA and rival terrorist group Al-Nusra Front. The only way to describe this unprincipled exploitation of his enemies is “parasitical”. With all the cunning of a parasite that rides on and feeds from the body of an unwilling host, Assad is demonstrating an evil opportunism while sheltering in the midst of the chaos, the wreckage and the carnage that he alone created.
