The rule of law and its careless enemies

Three people have been killed and eight injured in a knife attack in the German city of Solingen. The bloody attack was carried out on Friday, August 23, by a Syrian who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). Since then, politicians in Germany have not been addressing failures in violent crime prevention, or the dramatic understaffing of immigration authorities, but have been outdoing each other in their attempts to make deportations to Afghanistan and Syria possible. 

On Friday, August 30, the German government actually deported people to Afghanistan for the first time since the Taliban came back to power in 2021. There were “28 criminals” on a plane that took off from Leipzig/Halle, announced Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) on Friday morning.* 

The SPD foreign affairs spokesperson Nils Schmid had previously said that “talks with the Assad regime or the Taliban” were “unavoidable” in the process of arranging deportations. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) already announced that deportations of serious criminals and terrorists to these countries would be made possible again, after a knife attack by an Afghan in Mannheim in June.

The opposition has made similar comments. CDU parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz spoke of a “national emergency” and called for a general ban on the admission of people from Afghanistan and Syria. Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) called for the situation in Syria to be "reassessed". And Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) claimed there was "no reason to let people from the country stay in Germany in general". Apparently, the war in Syria is over.  

These bold announcements, incompatible with Germany’s constitution and the Geneva Convention, are already causing significant political damage. Even if the proposals are supposedly only aimed at criminals, the open racism that has come to light in these discussions, and which plays into the hands of the AfD, is disturbing. For many refugees, the debate is traumatising, because it revolves around two countries whose governments no longer even pretend to respect human rights and international law.   

Assad opposes refugees returning

After retaking power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban initially sought to adopt a more moderate stance. They have since passed laws that restrict women's rights more radically than in any other state. Even if they show no ambition to implement their extremist agenda abroad, deporting criminals to a place where they could be celebrated rather than condemned for their crimes would be a disservice to German security interests.   

The same applies to Syria. There is no rule of law in any of the territories into which the country has been divided. Reports from the Secretary-General of the United Nations bear witness to this. The last report on the entire country in 2023 stated: "Syrians continued to suffer human rights violations, including targeted killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, death in custody." In the first half of 2024, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented 53 cases of death under torture. Syria expert Charles Lister from the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote on Tuesday: "68+ people were killed across Syria over the past week, in violence in 12/14 of the country's provinces. Warfare, insurgency, terrorism & violent organized crime is everywhere you look." 

Leaving aside the fact that deportations have to be negotiated between state authorities, and that over a third of the country’s territory is outside of Syrian regime control – in both Idlib in the north-west, which is controlled by Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and in the areas controlled by Turkey through the Syrian National Army (SNA) – it is unlikely that deported extremists would be brought to justice and safely detained. Just as in Afghanistan. 

President Bashar al-Assad has vowed to rule every inch of Syria again – but ideally without its former inhabitants. The regime has never shown any willingness to let refugees return. High-ranking officials have threatened that the refugees' flight will neither be “forgotten nor forgiven”. Most of the refugees fled because the regime had driven them out with barrel bombs, starvation, chemical weapons, and the abduction of over 100,000 people.   

Drugs from Syria

A look at the war's last remaining fronts is not enough to fully understand why, to this day, 600 people from Syria seek asylum in Germany every month. Warfare has been followed by lawfare: a whole host of new legal measures were implemented to confiscate and resell the property of refugees in Syria's regime-held areas. This has created a situation in which it is even more difficult for the actual owners to return. In addition, Syria’s economy is in ruins. Many factories have been destroyed, and companies have moved to Turkey. 

Illegal streams of income have become even more vital to the Assad regime. Syria ranks eleventh out of 193 countries on the Global Organised Crime Index. “Criminal actors in Syria encompass various entities, most notably state-embedded actors”, the index states. The best example is the Captagon business, controlled by Assad's brother Maher and several cousins. They have made Syria the world's largest producer of the drug.   

The population suffers under what economist Karam Shaar and political scientist Steven Heydemann describe as an "architecture of corruption", formed of economic networks that reward loyal supporters and flush money into Assad's coffers. To keep the security forces happy, the regime tolerates or encourages the army and militias loyal to the regime to supplement their income through extortion and corruption. Relatives of convicts, for example, are often made to pay four-figure sums for prison visits. 

Perfecting corruption

The Syrian regime will use any means to divide Western societies – migration as well as terrorism. In 2020 and 2021, numerous flights from Damascus brought Syrian refugees to the Polish border through Belarus, so that they could attempt to enter the EU. It was only after the EU imposed sanctions on the airline Cham Wings that this organised smuggling was stopped. The airline's main shareholder at the time was allegedly Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of the Syrian president. 

The business of trafficking Syrian refugees in Lebanon is proving to be particularly macabre. The Assad regime has refused to offer any solution for more than one million people – the few returnees it accepts run the risk of being taken directly to the interrogation centres of the Syrian secret services. Some are released for ransom. Many are offered to be smuggled back to Lebanon for around 200 US dollars – a self-perpetuating business model, corruption perfected. 

Anyone in Germany who expects the leadership in Damascus to cooperate on security issues does not understand what makes the regime tick. Consulting Assad to solve problems does not make him your partner. Instead, such an approach will awaken his desire to make himself indispensable by fuelling the problems further. Even in the past, Assad has proved little more useful in this respect than Islamist extremists.   

Only in comparison with the brutality of IS was Assad able to present himself as the lesser evil – even when international law experts said he was committing “industrial scale killing”. Whenever it seemed opportune, Assad gave IS a free rein, for example when IS prevented 400 members of the Syrian White Helmets, who were always a thorn in the regime’s side, from being brought to safety in 2018. He also gave them free rein to intimidate minorities, as in the case of the Druze in Suweida in southern Syria in 2018, who were only helped by regime troops after IS had already killed and kidnapped hundreds.

Can the Kurds take in criminals?

The only remaining possibility is north-east Syria, which is controlled by the Kurdish-dominated Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). This economically privileged region, with its fertile soil and oil and gas reserves, has seen comparatively little destruction as it was never subject to regime air strikes. The Kurds are also not suspected of supporting Islamist extremists, as they were partners of the West in the fight against IS.   

As soon as IS was territorially defeated in 2017, most Western states no longer saw themselves as responsible for the conflict. There are still 45,000 people in the al-Hol detention centre today, including thousands of so-called third-country nationals, some of whom have Western nationalities. Many of the countries of origin refuse to take back their citizens.    

According to Syria expert Kristin Helberg, Germany has brought a total of 27 women, 80 children and only one man to Germany, but not the other 30 or so male nationals. The fact that thousands have been held in al-Hol for years without trial is not only problematic from a human rights perspective, but also for security reasons: children grow up in the camp in a violent, radicalised environment without any prospects.  

The Syrian Kurds are still being supported by around 900 US soldiers who, among other roles, are guarding the prisons and camps in north-east Syria. However, if Donald Trump wins the US election in November, there is no guarantee that the US troops will remain in Syria. Anyone who expects the Kurdish self-administration to take in Syrians from Germany who have committed criminal offences would at least have to offer a solution for the remaining German IS fighters in return.   

The bottom line: the debate in Germany ignores the reality in Syria. It is fueling resentment and making steep demands that cannot be implemented. Politicians are undermining the foundations of democracy when they carelessly create the impression that terrorism cannot be dealt with by constitutional means alone.  

* This article was last updated on August 31, 12:17 PM.

Bente Scheller has led the Middle East and North Africa department of the Green-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) in Berlin since 2019. From 2012 to 2019, she was head of the HBS Middle East regional office in Beirut, Lebanon. Prior to that, she led the office in Afghanistan and worked as a counter-terrorism officer at the German embassy in Damascus from 2002 to 2004. She completed her doctorate on Syrian foreign policy at FU Berlin. 

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