At the end of last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that shortages of medicines, food, and other basic supplies mean that the coronavirus pandemic is apt to have a “catastrophic impact” on the northeastern portion of Syria. But the WHO has largely ceased its operations in the area since the beginning of this year, caving to pressure from Bashar al-Assad’s government and from his most important ally, Russia. The UN too has ended its policy of funneling funds to private charities there, now only supporting those groups approved by Damascus. Seth Frantzman comments:

The way the UN works makes it so that no one who is not loyal to the Syrian regime receives aid in Syria. For instance, the UN’s World Food Program conducted air drops to the Syrian-regime-held city off Deir Ezzor when it was under siege by Islamic State between 2015 and 2017. . . . But there were no UN-supported air drops for people in the cities of Raqqa, Qamishli, Kobane, or Idlib, or in refugee camps or areas outside Syrian regime control.

[Now] the Syrian regime [has] a veto over aid to eastern Syria and a way to use it as a weapon. Turkey and Russia collaborated in the effort, as Turkey turns off water to 460,000 people in eastern Syria, and Russia supports the Syrian regime. [In] eastern Syria, an area of millions of people who are recovering from Islamic State’s atrocities, . . . the WHO also works through the Syrian regime rather than providing equal access to people [in need]. The pandemic has only made matters worse.

The larger context is that Russia, Iran, and Turkey want the U.S. to leave eastern Syria.

By making life more difficult in areas where there remains an American military presence, Frantzman concludes, these countries are hoping they can force Washington’s hand.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.