BEIRUT – The Syrian police stormed her house and took her husband away. His eldest son died in the rain of shells from the Syrian government on his hometown. So, like millions of other Syrians, Hanadi Hafisi fled the country with the intention of returning when the war ended.

A decade later, she is still a refugee in Turkey, where her work in a center that treats the war-wounded exposes her to a constant display of human destruction wrought by President Bashar Assad of Syria and his Russian supporters: paralysis, missing hands and legs, and a deep trauma that leaves his patients wondering why such disasters consumed their lives.

“I don’t know what to say to them when they ask me if they will achieve justice,” said Hafisi, 46. “Seriously, what to tell them? That Bashar will be held responsible? That he will be judged? Of course not.”

As the world comes to grips with the grim realities of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – once-bustling neighborhoods bombarded, civilians killed by shells as they tried to flee, speculation over the use of chemical weapons by Russia – many Syrians have watched with a horrifying sense of deja vu and a deep foreboding of what lies ahead.

The Syrian war began 11 years ago this month with an anti-Assad uprising that escalated into a multifaceted conflict between the government, armed rebels, jihadists and others. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions have fled their homes, and Assad has remained in power, thanks in large part to the massive support he has received from the man currently leading the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The legacy of the war in Syria and Russia’s role in it hangs heavily on Ukraine, offering potential lessons for Putin, analysts say: that ‘red lines’ set by the West can be crossed without major consequences; that diplomacy purportedly aimed at stopping violence can be used to distract from it; and that autocrats can do terrible things and face international sanctions – and still stay in power.

Much of the brutality Assad has deployed to crush his enemies has been documented in real time and has sparked outrage that left many thinking he could never get away with it.

He sent soldiers and armed thugs to stop protests by locking up activists and firing live ammunition into crowds. As the opposition took up arms, its troops bombarded, bombarded and imposed starvation sieges on towns and neighborhoods that supported the rebels.

These actions killed large numbers of civilians and sent many others fleeing for their lives. More than half of Syria’s pre-war population was displaced during the war, and 5.7 million refugees remain outside the country.

In August 2013, Assad’s forces shocked the world when they deployed chemical weapons on rebel-held towns near the capital, Damascus, killing more than 1,400 people, US officials said.

Many Syrians expected such a flagrant violation of international law to trigger Western military intervention, especially since President Barack Obama had called the use of chemical weapons a “red line”.

“I was sure we had witnessed something that very few people had experienced before, like those who witnessed Chernobyl or Hiroshima,” recalls 29-year-old Ibrahim Alfawal, who survived the chemical attack and said it felt like “judgment day”.

But he was shocked when the United States did not intervene. Assad’s forces eventually took over the towns that had been gassed, appearing to pay no price for his use of banned weapons.

It seemed to show that Assad could count on impunity, Alfawal said, and Syrian forces’ attacks on civilian infrastructure – including schools, hospitals, neighborhoods and bakeries where families had lined up to buy bread – have only intensified.

In 2015, Putin sent Russian forces to aid Assad’s beleaguered army, and soon Russian officers were advising Syrian forces and Russian planes were dropping bombs on Syrian cities – enjoying the same impunity as Assad seemed to have.

In Ukraine, Russia has also used disinformation campaigns similar to those it launched in Syria, where it falsely labeled opposition activists as al-Qaeda members and accused rebels of launching the attacks. chemicals as false flag operations to blame the Syrian government.

“They’re adopting the same concept they used in Syria, lie and stick to it,” Alfawal said of Russia’s approach to Ukraine.

Chemical attacks in Syria have continued. In addition to two that killed large numbers of people – in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in 2017 and east of Damascus in 2018 – there were at least 350 other attacks with chemical substances, according to Tobias Schneider, researcher at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.

There is no evidence that chemical weapons were used in Ukraine, but watching the war there, many Syrians see signs that Putin is using parts of the Syria playbook.

The Russians “are ready to devour the green and the dry,” said Radwan Alhomsy, a Syrian activist from southern Turkey, using an Arabic idiom meaning destroy everything. “They don’t care about the international community or anything else. We saw it in Syria. Burning schools is not new to us. This is ground they want to take, and they will take it.

European analysts point to differences between the wars in Syria and Ukraine that could lead to different Western responses. Unlike Putin, Assad fought to regain control of his own country, not to take control of one of his neighbors. Unlike Syria, Russia is a nuclear power, which complicates the issue of military intervention.

And while the United States and its European allies largely let Assad off the hook with the use of chemical weapons in the Middle East, Putin’s doing it on the European continent would most likely provoke greater concern and prompt a response. firmer.

“If Putin thinks he will be treated like al-Assad, he is mistaken because he is not al-Assad and this is not Syria,” said Patricia Lewis, director of the international security program at Chatham House. .

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