Barack Obama’s impending departure from the White House has put many Americans in an elegiac mood.

Despite an average approval rating of only 48 percent— the lowest, surprisingly, of our last five presidents — he has always been beloved, if not revered, by the scribbling classes.

Just as many prematurely deemed Bush the worst president ever, so many are now ready to enshrine Obama as one of the all-time greats.

Or at least they were until the fall of Aleppo.

Since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, Americans have regarded the carnage there as essentially a humanitarian disaster.

For Obama, contemplating his legacy, the awful death and destruction that Syria has suffered — the 400,000 deaths, the wholesale wasting of civilian neighborhoods, the wanton use of sarin gas and chlorine gas and barrel bombs, the untold atrocities — has raised the old question of how future generations will judge an American president’s passivity or ineffectuality in the face of mass slaughter.

Perhaps Obama has been hoping for a dispensation, since presidential reputations have never suffered much for such sins of omission. With a few notable exceptions, biographies, textbooks, obituaries, and even public memory have dwelled little on George W. Bush’s inaction in Darfur, Bill Clinton’s floundering over Rwanda, George H.W. Bush’s dithering about Bosnia, Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness in Cambodia, Gerald Ford’s cold realism toward East Timor, or Richard Nixon’s complicity in Bangladesh. “

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler reportedly said in 1939, predicting that the world’s amnesia about the Turks’ mass killings should allow his armies to proceed in all ruthlessness without fear of judgment. We might think of those words in considering how little attention in our history books is given to our presidents’ very limited roles in standing up to atrocities overseas.

And yet now, as Obama’s presidency winds down, and a ceasefire begins to take effect Syria that Washington played no role in negotiating, it’s becoming clear that the loss of life and the humanitarian crisis represent just the first of many consequences that historians will have to assess as they ask how the United States, under Obama’s leadership, chose to deal, or not to deal, with the Syrian Civil War. And if historians tend to give presidents a pass on failing to arrest slaughter, they are not so generous in evaluating the loss of American influence around the world.

Right now, the apparent loss of that influence seems to loom newly large. The brutal Russian-backed assault in December crushed the Syrian resistance in its main holdout city, Aleppo, calling into question whether the rebel forces will still be able to carry on any insurrection at all.

President Bashar al-Assad is gathering with the despots of Russia, Turkey, and Iran to draw up the terms of resolution, pointedly excluding the United States and the United Nations. Vladimir Putin seems high in his saddle.

For years, Obama has insisted that Syria isn’t of great strategic importance to the United States. But that judgment represents not just a break from decades of geostrategic thinking but a gamble of considerable risk. If Obama is wrong, his miscalculation could have massive implications.Should Russia displace the United States as the region’s preeminent great power, it will affect America’s access to energy, its ability to fight terrorism, its capacity to ensure Israel’s survival, and its relationship with states like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Equally important are the implications of Obama’s Syria policy on Europe’s immigration crisis. For decades the continent has struggled, with mixed results, to assimilate Muslim arrivals from the Middle East and Africa, many of whom come bearing sharply alien cultural values.

But the new waves of Syrian refugees unleashed by the failure to contain the civil war there has now created a crisis of unparalleled magnitude. Countries from Turkey and Hungary to Germany and France have been thrown into turmoil. Cultural tensions escalated, empowering right-wing nationalist parties across the continent and contributing to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

In the United States this past year, Donald Trump amplified his own pandering to anti-Mexican sentiment with new worries about an influx of Syrian refugees — stoking anti-immigrant fears. Around the world, it seems, the rise of noxious populist currents can be traced, at least in part, to the deepening of the immigration crises by the Syrian war.

Yet a third result of Obama’s ineffectuality lay in the rise of the Islamic State, a terrorist organization even more bloody-minded and bent on conquest than the al Qaeda fragments from which it sprang. Obama obviously did not create the Islamic State, contrary to Donald Trump’s absurd campaign-trail slanders. But his administration was laggard in countering its gathering strength.

Although the terrorist outfit is on the defensive now, it continues to orchestrate deadly strikes in Europe, and, indirectly, to inspire lone-wolf attacks in the United States, guaranteeing that terrorism will remain a major threat on both continents for years to come.

Fourth, the failure to contain the Islamic State early on also forced the United States to change its strategy in Syria. Turning his attention from Assad, Obama now chose to direct American military assistance mainly into the fight against the radical Islamist group. Among other effects, this reorientation of American policy made it much less likely — if not impossible — for Obama to deliver on his August 2011 vow that Assad must go.

Fifth and finally, it wasn’t only Assad who emerged emboldened. Fatefully, in 2012 Obama had declared that if Assad were to use chemical weapons, he would cross a red line that would require American military intervention.

A year later, evidence surfaced that Assad did precisely that, firing rockets filled with sarin gas at towns around Damascus.

But in the face of skeptical congressional opinion at home, Obama backed down from reprisals. Instead he settled for a Russian proposal that Syria merely dismantle its weapons stockpiles, but face no punishment for its war crimes.

Obama has made clear that he disdains the concept of “credibility” — the idea that the U.S. must follow through on its commitments lest it get pushed around in the future. But the reversal of policy in September 2013 on a clearly articulated principle sent shivers from Seoul to Jerusalem to Tallinn — and may well have encouraged America’s adversaries, including Russia, to test Obama further.

Putin’s illegal 2014 seizure of Crimea and the ongoing fomenting of unrest in eastern and southern Ukraine were worrisome enough. But now evidence suggests that the Russian president played a direct role in hacking Democratic Party officials’ emails in an effort to tip the scales of the presidential election in favor of Trump. These disclosures have shattered any claims that Obama showed sufficient resolve against a formidable, confident, and completely immoral rival for geopolitical influence.

How all of this will affect Obama’s reputation in the long run is difficult to predict. Observers can only speculate, recognizing all the while that we can’t know which elements of Obama’s policy future historians will emphasize and which they will ignore, which they will esteem and which they will scorn.

Sadly, it seems probable that Obama won’t be judged too harshly for failing to arrest the carnage in Syria. For all our fretting, inaction in the face of genocide or mass slaughter or humanitarian disaster has never hurt our presidents much in the historical reckonings.

It is true that in the wake of the Holocaust, Americans grew conscious of the sufferings of foreign peoples and of their own responsibility, as citizens of the world’s mightiest nation, to try to do something. Looking at the past through this new lens, even the sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt took a mild hit, as historians learned more about and came to question his failure to assist the Jewish refugees of Europe, to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, or otherwise impede or retard Hitler’s killing machine.

More recently, historians and journalists like Samantha Power, Ben Kiernan, and Gary J. Bass directed historians’ attention to other genocides and mass slaughters. Human rights advocates argued more vociferously that the world’s mightiest nations had a duty to try to prevent such atrocities.

But that consciousness peaked in the 1990s, and because military interventionism has fallen out of fashion since the Iraq War, it has been receding. Obama may have sought some solace in the fact that presidents’ reputations have not typically suffered for inaction in the face of mass slaughter.

They do suffer, however, for frittering away American power and prestige. Though Harry Truman wins high marks for his handling of the communist threat in Europe, he and the Democratic Party were haunted for years by the question, following Mao Zedong’s civil war victory in 1949, of “Who lost China?” — feeding a domestic political environment that arguably made his successors keener to intervene in Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Similarly, Jimmy Carter’s inability to deal effectively either with the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan or the revolutionary Iranian government’s seizure of 52 American hostages contributed to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 as well as to the low esteem in which his foreign policy is held by scholars. Presidents can’t, of course, always prevent the outbreak of conflicts and wars, but how they respond to those wars — and whether the U.S. emerges from them stronger or weaker, and the world safer or more precarious — is a telling measure of leadership.

On the other hand, as Obama knows well, presidents also suffer for wars gone badly. Lyndon Johnson should be remembered as one of America’s greatest presidents, but his stubborn prosecution of the Vietnam War, despite knowing it was unwinnable, has kept him out of the pantheon of greatness. (It’s possible that when the Vietnam-obsessed Baby Boomers pass from the scene, LBJ will be judged with greater balance and charity.)

George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, similarly, with all its disastrous implications, is likely to remain the central episode of his presidency for a long time, outranking even his more successful response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Indeed, Obama, entering office after Bush’s ruinous adventurism, made the avoidance of another quagmire his primary goal. Encouraged by national security aides who hailed from the realm of domestic politics, Obama let the fear of crossing antiwar opinion dictate his path. Yet in treading lightly, Obama misplaced his big stick.

A conciliator by nature, he had reached the presidency on promises to unite inimical groups — red-staters and blue-staters, whites and blacks — and in his inaugural address he likewise pledged to bridge the gap with the Arab world. But just as he wasn’t prepared for the implacability of congressional Republicans, who scorned his outstretched hand in a bid to bolster their own power, so he did not count on foreign adversaries taking advantage of his aversion to conflict.

Obama’s Syria legacy won’t be the only factor shaping how posterity regards his foreign policy. The uneven efforts to wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the still-controversial Iran nuclear deal, the opening to Cuba, the weakening of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, the struggles to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians — these add up to a mixed and complicated record whose implications will take time and thought to untangle. It may be that his focus on building alliances in Asia will prove, despite the collapse of his Trans-Pacific Partnership, to be of greater long-term significance than his misadventures in Syria.

But for now it seems hard to escape the conclusion that in correcting for Bush’s overly aggressive foreign policy, Obama went too far in avoiding confrontations, and that in that halting and hesitant approach he wound up neither strengthening his country’s influence and status nor its power to bring about its ultimate goal of a safer and more peaceful world.

SEE ALSO: Here's what you can do to help besieged, war-torn Aleppo, Syria

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A Syrian migrant who arrived in Germany two years ago has been arrested on suspicion of seeking funds from Islamic State to drive truck bombs into a crowd, a German state prosecutor's office said on Monday.

The arrest follows an attack two weeks ago when a Tunisian whose asylum request had been rejected rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people. The man, Anis Amri, 24, was later shot dead by Italian police.

In the latest case, the prosecutor in the western city of Saarbruecken said the 38-year-old Syrian was detained on Saturday and a formal arrest warrant was issued on Sunday on suspicion that he was trying to raise 180,000 euros ($189,000) to fund an attack.

Prosecutor Christoph Rebmann said the man, whom he did not name, was suspected of seeking the money from Islamic State in Syria to buy trucks and load 400-500 kg (880-1,100 pounds) of explosives into each of them.

"He is suspected of ... requesting 180,000 euros from a contact person in Syria on his cell phone from Saarbruecken in December, 2016 so that he could acquire vehicles to pack with explosives and drive them into a crowd," Rebmann said in a statement.

The man has admitted making contact with Islamic State, which is also know as ISIS, but denied he had any plans to stage an attack.

"He said he wanted the money from ISIS to support his family back in Syria," Rebmann told Reuters, adding that the Syrian had said he wanted to fool the jihadist group into sending him the money.

The Syrian is from the city of Raqqa, Islamic State's main stronghold in the country. The prosecutor's office in Saarbruecken, near the French border, had been alerted to his activities by the BKA federal crime office.

The Syrian came to Germany on Dec. 5, 2014, just before a wave of more than 1.1 million asylum-seekers arrived from the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2015. He was given permission to stay in Germany on Jan. 12, 2015.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made the now-controversial decision to open the country's borders to refugees in September, 2015, described Islamist terrorism on New Year's Eve as the greatest test facing Germany.

She has also said she is sickened by the prospect that refugees Germany has tried to help could mount attacks.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said that failed asylum seekers who are regarded as a danger should be detained until they can be deported. He made the suggestion in a guest column in Tuesday's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

Political analysts, conservative allies and diplomats have said a major attack could damage Merkel's hopes of winning a fourth term in September's election. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has blamed her policies for the Dec. 19 Berlin attack.

In October, a Syrian refugee committed suicide in prison after being arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on a Berlin airport.

 (Additional reporting by Thorsten Severin; editing by David Stamp)

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BEIRUT (AP) — Residents of Damascus are scrambling for clean water after the government attacked rebels holding the city's main source in a nearby valley, producing an outage that has stretched on for nearly two weeks.

The cut-off is a major challenge to the government's effort throughout the nearly 6-year-old civil war to keep the capital as insulated as possible from the effects of the conflict tearing apart much of the country.

The battle for resources has always been an undercurrent to the war. The government, in particular, has advertised its efforts to keep electricity and water flowing to areas under its control, while it blocks the U.N. and other relief agencies from supplying opposition zones.

But rarely has that struggle been so starkly felt inside the capital.

"I have stopped cleaning the house, washing dishes or clothes. We no longer take showers," said Mona Maqssoud, a 50-year-old resident of Damascus. She said residents have relied on water tankers that come by occasionally and give 20 liters (5 gallons) of water to each house, but that hasn't been enough.

"We begged the drivers (to return) to our neighborhood, but they refused."

The opposition has long controlled Wadi Barada, the valley northwest of Damascus through which the river of the same name flows to the capital. The government and the opposition had previously had an understanding to keep water services running. But that modus vivendi ended when forces of President Bashar Assad and his allies, the Lebanon Hezbollah guerrilla force, attacked the valley, home to some 100,000 people.

The cut-off, since Dec. 22, is the longest Damascus has seen, say residents, who are accustomed to intermittent outages.

The Barada River and its source, the Ain al-Fijeh spring, supply 70 percent of the water for Damascus and its environs. An activist-run media collective in the Barada Valley said government and Russian aircraft had bombed the Ain el-Fijeh water processing facility, puncturing its fuel depots and contaminating the water stream. The collective said the plant's electrical control systems had been destroyed as well. Images showed the roof of the facility collapsed into its main water basin. An activist with the group, Abu Mohammed al-Bardawi, said it would take at least two months to get the facilities working again.

Damascus officials said they shut off the water after opposition forces poured gasoline into the river. The government denied attacking the water processing facility, saying it would not set out to harm its own population. Still, it would not be the first time it strikes its own facilities: government strikes hit pumping stations in the northern city of Aleppo in April, September, and November.

Damascus, the seat of Assad's power, has been spared from the widespread destruction in other parts of the country, though rebels on the outskirts occasionally fire mortar rounds into the city. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have flocked to the capital seeking its relative security, swelling its population to 4 million from 2 million, according to the UN.

For its residents, the water cuts are a grueling reminder of the war beyond.

"If this goes on, I will rent a room at a hotel just to take a shower," said a 60-year-old woman carrying a pair of buckets back to her apartment on the sixth-floor of a walk-up building. Like many others in the capital, she was filling her basins from distribution points at a parks and mosques. The local press is reporting soaring prices for unregulated private water.

Residents are making adjustments to cope. Some are now flushing their toilets with bottled water. Others are dining on disposable tableware as an alternative to doing the dishes.

Ground wells around Damascus, even at maximum capacity, can only cover about a third of the minimum water demand of around 600,000 cubic meters a day, according to UNICEF spokeswoman Juliette Touma.

The agency has rehabilitated some 200 wells around the capital since 2011, partially insuring the government against the effects of its own Barada Valley campaign. This year, UNICEF funded $50 million in water projects in Syria.

The Barada Valley is surrounded by all sides by the Syrian army and Hezbollah forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict.

Pro-government forces have kept up their assault with airstrikes, artillery and infantry pushes, despite a Russia and Turkey-brokered cease-fire that went into effect Friday. The government and the Observatory say fighters loyal to al-Qaida are present in the valley, and the militant are not included in the cease-fire. Local residents say there are no al-Qaida fighters in the valley.

"Most of the food depots have now been struck and burned," said al-Bardawi. "They are striking the schools we are using for shelters."

In early December, pro-government media reported efforts by officials to reach a so-called "reconciliation agreement" with the towns and villages of Barada Valley, under which thousands of dissidents, military defectors and draft-dodgers would leave in exchange for the valley submitting to government control.

The opposition and the U.N. have likened these sorts of agreements to forced displacement. Such deals were reached in other areas around the capital under the pressure of years of government bombardment and siege.

Barada opposition fighters and councils have held out against any settlement. Activists say they believe that prompted the renewed government assault.

Opposition forces have retaliated by choking a natural gas pipeline to Damascus to pressure the government to stop its offensive, compounding the woes of the resource starved capital. A group of rebels calling themselves the Coalition for the Joint Defense of Syria filmed themselves cutting the gas to the capital at an isolated station outside the capital Thursday.

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As of September, an estimated 11 million Syrians had fled their homes since the war started in March 2011. They escaped to neighboring countries like Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as to Europe. 

As migrants made the trek from their war-torn homes to new and unfamiliar places, many of them used messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Line in order to communicate with their families. One used a smartphone to convince the Greek Coast Guard to rescue a boat full of people, as we reported on our podcast, Codebreaker, produced with Marketplace. Others use Google Maps to track their locations.

This is the first refugee crisis that has been digitally documented. And migrants are adding to that in one critical way – they're taking selfies at different points throughout their journeys to memorialize their path to safety.

"We want memories from the bad trip we had," Mehar Ahmed Aloussi, 30, from Damascus, told TIME. "When I go and settle down in another country, I want to remember my way."

The season finale of season 2 of Codebreaker has more stories of how technology is affecting migrants:

SEE ALSO: Children have suffered the brunt of Syria's bloody civil war

Alvand, 18, from Kobani, Syria takes a selfie with his friends as they walk along a railway track after crossing into Hungary from the border with Serbia near the village of Roszke.

Syrian refugees take "selfies" moments after arriving on an overcrowded dinghy at a beach on the Greek island of Kos, after crossing a part of the Aegean sea from Turkey.

Syrian refugees take selfies moments after arriving on a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos, September 14, 2015. Of the record total of 432,761 refugees and migrants who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe as of September 2015, an estimated 309,000 people had arrived by sea in Greece, the International Organization for Migration said.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Thousands of people are starting to return to formerly rebel-held east Aleppo despite freezing weather and destruction "beyond imagination", a top U.N. official told Reuters from the Syrian city.

In the last couple of days around 2,200 families have returned to the Hanano housing district, said Sajjad Malik, country representative in Syria for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"People are coming out to east Aleppo to see their shops, their houses, to see if the building is standing and the house is not that looted ... to see, should they come back," he said in an interview.

But given the appalling conditions, the U.N. is not encouraging people to return.

"It is extremely, bitterly cold here," said Malik. "The houses people are going back to have no windows or doors, no cooking facilities."

Aid is vital to prevent more deaths. The U.N. is helping people to restart their lives in one room of their apartments to start with, he said, giving them mats, sleeping bags and plastic sheets to cover blown-out windows.

'It's beyond imagination'

Hanano was one of the first Aleppo neighborhoods to fall to rebels in 2012, and the first to be retaken by the Syrian government on its way to seizing back full control of the northern city last month - the biggest victory for President Bashar al-Assad in nearly six years of war.

As government forces rapidly advanced, some residents stayed put, tens of thousands fled of their own accord and around 35,000 fighters and civilians were evacuated in late December in convoys organized by the Syrian government.

After months of fierce Syrian and Russian air strikes, reconstruction will take a long time, Malik said, but the immediate priority is to keep people warm and fed. U.N.-supported partners provide hot meals twice a day to 21,000 people, and 40,000 people get baked bread every day.

Over 1.1 million people once again have access to clean water in bottles or through tankers and wells.

Mobile clinics are up and running, and more than 10,000 children have received polio vaccinations. Thousands of children who have not been able to attend school need reintegrating into the education system through remedial classes to rebuild their confidence, Malik said.

There was no register of births, deaths and marriages in the rebel-held sector, so the U.N. is working with the government to issue people with papers. "I met a woman with five children and she was excited that she now has her kids registered as Syrians. She has ID cards and a family book," he said.

Bombing has destroyed hospitals, schools, roads and houses, and damaged the two main water pumping stations. The experienced U.N. official said the level of destruction surpassed anything he had seen in conflict zones like Afghanistan and Somalia.

"Nothing would have prepared us to see the scale of destruction there, it's beyond imagination."

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

SEE ALSO: Here's what you can do to help besieged, war-torn Aleppo, Syria

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A BBC sketch satirising British women who have left to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group has attracted controversy and praise alike online.

The two-minute-long skit titled The Real Housewives of ISIS features four British Muslim women who have left their homes in the UK to join the armed group in Syria.

First published online on Tuesday, the sketch has picked up millions of views on Facebook and has been shared widely on other social media platforms.

One scene portrays a woman undecided about what to wear to a beheading, and another shows two of the women angry at each other for wearing the same suicide vest.

The segment is part of a comedy show called Revolting, which directs its humour at lampooning current affairs issues.

Muslim sketch creator Faraz Ali described the BBC skit as "poor taste".

"For the few documented events where young girls, often under 18, have left the UK, there is no doubt this has been a result of dangerous grooming and misguidance," he said.

"Making light of this situation feels inherently wrong, almost capitalising on the suffering of these young girls who acted without proper insight," he added.

Ali said that while there was merit in mocking ISIL, doing so "runs the risk of making light of the very real and significant problems ISIL leaves in its wake".

British Muslim comedian Ali Shahalom was one of the many who welcomed the segment, describing it as "very funny" in a Facebook post, adding he was not offended by the material.

"The sketch ridicules online grooming and draws attention to an important topic," he said.

"From what I've seen, it doesn't offend religion. Satire like this highlights the absurdity of those that recruit and get recruited for ISIS," he added.

Shahalom acknowledged the sensitivities of covering the topic but said it was one writers should not be afraid to approach.

Debate played out in the comment section underneath the video on Facebook, with many not as impressed with the skit as Shahalom.

"Bad taste, not funny at all," said commenter Anna Butcher.

"I'm sure those who have been effected by ISIS, or [have] been victims of them, or the relatives of those killed in terrorists attacks, won't be laughing?" she added, using an alternate acronym for ISIL.

Warwick University academic Sara Salem said that while such comedy set out to show how "ridiculous" Islamophobic ideas were, it ended up reinforcing such stereotypes instead.

"The trouble with this type of humour is that it ignores the broader context in which it will be revived, namely British society," Salem said.

"While it may challenge some people's conceptions of Muslim women by making light of tropes we hear of constantly, for many others it won't serve as anything more than comedy based on things they already believe in and will continue believing in.

"Not only is it not a challenge to these stereotypes, it is using them to make light of what is ultimately not a very funny situation."

Previous pranks

The creators of Revolting, Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein, have previously drawn controversy for their satire and daring political pranks.

Pro-Israel groups reacted angrily when the pair pretended to be building contractors and visited shops in London to tell them their businesses would be confiscated to expand the nearby Israeli embassy.

The pair also put up posters at the International Criminal Court demanding the arrest of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and in another stunt tried to present a plaqueto Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for his purported talent for lying.

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For a nation that isn’t officially at war against another nation, the United States dropped an awful lot of bombs on a pretty large number of countries last year, according to research by Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and research associate Jennifer Wilson.

According to their calculations, based on data released by the Pentagon as well as information collected by think tanks and news organizations, the U.S. dropped some 26,171 bombs across all its weapons platforms, on targets in seven different countries.

The biggest recipients were Syria (12,192) and Iraq (12,095), where the U.S. is participating in the effort to destroy the terror group ISIS, which still controls parts of both countries.

Next on the list was Afghanistan where, despite having pulled out the vast majority of combat troops years ago, the U.S. saw the need to drop 1,337 bombs. The only other country in triple digits was Libya, which was hit with 496.

Smaller targets included Yemen (34), Somalia (14) and Pakistan (3). The total number of bombs dropped was up 3,027 over the previous year, they found.

Writing on his blog, Zenko admits, “This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single ‘strike,’ according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions.”

Zenko added, “As President Obama enters the final weeks of his presidency, there will be ample assessments of his foreign military approach, which has focused on reducing U.S. ground combat troops (with the notable exception of the Afghanistan surge), supporting local security partners, and authorizing the expansive use of air power. Whether this strategy ‘works’—i.e. reduces the threat posed by extremists operating from those countries and improves overall security and governance on the ground—is highly contested. Yet, for better or worse, these are the central [tenets] of the Obama doctrine.”

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As 2016 comes to an end, the tumult of the past year shows the truly unpredictable state of world affairs.

Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US showed the inherent failures of relying too heavily on public polling, while the scope and ability of ISIS attacks worldwide served as a crude wake-up call to the group's deadly reach, even as it loses ground in the Middle East. 

But even as 2016 proved to be a year full of surprises, several of the predictions from Business Insider's Military & Defense team for what the year held proved to be accurate: The South China Sea has only become more militarized, the leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo has extended his rule beyond constitutional limits, and the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey has gone off the rails. 

Here are 11 big geopolitical events that we think will come to pass in 2017.

SEE ALSO: Here's what we thought would happen in 2016

Paul Szoldra's predictions: North Korea will present one of the first tests for a Trump White House.

The Hermit Kingdom has always been a wild card on the national security stage. While most experts can make predictions as to what countries would do in certain situations, the only prediction one can really ascribe to North Korea’s leadership is bluster and chest-thumping.

Whether its joint military training exercises with the US and South Korea militaries or US Navy ships being seen too close to North Korean shores, Pyongyang often has a response, and it’s usually not good.

One example that comes to mind is North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island in 2010. Would President Trump be a hardliner toward the North, possibly increasing tensions? With Kim Jong-un inching closer to having a viable offensive nuclear weapons program, those tensions may come sooner rather than later.

Russia will make more provocative moves against Baltic states to see how Trump and the world respond.

Russia has been emboldened by its moves into Ukraine, especially when it was able to infiltrate and eventually annex Crimea — with little recourse from the international community.

Moscow’s top government hackers conducted a major cyberattack against the US electoral process, and though it was called out in public by the Obama administration, Russia’s denial of hacking brings to mind its initial denials of taking over Crimea. Only after a large portion of the world comes out against Moscow does Russia finally say, yeah, you caught us.

We expect more of Moscow’s meddling in other’s affairs, especially in the Baltic states. Russia moved nuclear-capable missiles very close to Poland and Lithuania in October. NATO has responded by putting troops and tanks in Baltic states.

Will this Cold War-like buildup continue? That’s very likely. And with President Trump in charge, it will be interesting to see whether Moscow gets the pushback it has seen in the past — or whether it encounters a new, conciliatory tack.

The Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa will be directly attacked by a large-scale ground assault.

ISIS’ power is on the trend downward, and that’s going to continue into 2017. The US and Iraq finally have their act together when it comes to confronting the terrorist group within Iraq’s borders. Although efforts to rout the group from Mosul are going slowly, it’s likely that the city will be back in the hands of the Iraqi army by early next year.

US military leaders say it could be another two to four months of tough fighting before Mosul is secured. After Mosul, it can be expected that ISIS will try to hold out in remaining Iraqi cities before most fighters fall back to its Syrian capital.

That’ll mean a much, much tougher fight once Raqqa comes under assault, but we think an attack in 2017 is likely, especially if Mosul falls and Syria’s government forces take more control back from rebels.

In the past, Syrian government forces have basically ignored ISIS and its Raqqa stronghold. If the war looks to be coming to a close against the anti-government rebels, it’s likely that Damascus will then go after ISIS — which could mean a very awkward coalition emerges between the governments of Syria, Russia, Iran, and the United States.

“The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” Barack Obama said on Dec. 16, during his final press conference as president. 

“They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate. But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - A Syrian truce brokered by Russia and Turkey was under growing strain on Monday as rebels vowed to respond to government violations and President Bashar al-Assad said the army would retake an important rebel-held area near Damascus.

Assad, in comments to French media, also said his government was ready to negotiate on "everything" at peace talks his Russian allies hope to convene in Kazakhstan, including his own position within the framework of the Syrian constitution.

But he indicated any new constitution must be put to a referendum and it was up to Syrians to elect their president.

His opponents have insisted throughout nearly six years of civil war that he must leave power under any future peace deal. But since Russia joined the war on his side in late 2015, his government's position on the battlefield has strengthened dramatically, giving him greater leverage now than at any time since the war's earliest days.

The ceasefire which came into effect on Dec. 30 aims to pave the way for the new peace talks which Russia hopes to convene with Turkish and Iranian support. But no date has been set for the talks and the warring sides have accused each other of truce violations.

The Moscow-led effort to revive diplomacy, without the participation of the United States, has emerged with Assad buoyed by the defeat of rebels in Aleppo, and as ties thaw between Russia and Turkey, long one of the rebels' main backers.

Ankara, now seemingly more worried by growing Kurdish sway in Syria than toppling Assad, supports the diplomatic push.

The latest fighting has been especially intense near Damascus where the army and allied militia are trying to capture a rebel-held area that includes the main water source supplying Damascus. It was bombed out of service more than two weeks ago.

Assad blamed truce violations on the insurgents, and said the army must "prevent terrorists from using the water to throttle the capital". He said it was the army's job to recapture the Wadi Barada area, which he said had been occupied by a jihadist group not covered by the ceasefire.

Rebels deny the area is in jihadist hands.

The United Nations has said 5.5 million people have had little or no running water for more than two weeks in Damascus. It blamed "deliberate targeting" for destroying the pumping station, without saying by whom. Rebels accuse the government.

Talks between the government and rebels aimed at allowing repairs to the pumping station failed at the weekend, and heavy air strikes were reported in the area on Sunday. 

'We will not remain silent'

The spokesman for one of the rebel groups that signed the ceasefire said rebel leaders had concluded they could not continue abiding the truce in what he described as a "unilateral way", and they would respond to attacks by the other side.

"Even if the agreement continues within what has been agreed on, they have the full right to respond to breaches wherever they are," Mamoun Haj Musa, spokesman for the Free Syrian Army-affiliated Suqur al Sham rebel group, told Reuters.

"They will open a number of fronts perhaps in the context of responding to violations that have stretched from Deraa to Aleppo, Idlib and of course Wadi Barada," he said.

Writing on Twitter, the head of another rebel group said rebels had agreed to the truce to spare Syrian blood. But with violence continuing, "we will not remain silent" wrote Mohamad al-Mansour, head of Jaish al-Nasr.

The rebels' already slim prospects of removing Assad by force diminished further after he recaptured all of Aleppo with direct military support from the Russian air force and Iranian-backed militias. The city, Syria's largest before the war, had been divided with rebels in control of the east since 2012.

President-elect Donald Trump has indicated he may cut U.S. support for the rebels, a move that would further diminish the risks to Assad, who has consolidated his rule around the major cities of western Syria and the coast.

Swathes of Syria remain out of his control, including the Islamic State-controlled eastern province of Deir al-Zor, large areas of northern Syria that have been taken over by a Kurdish militia, and pockets of rebel-held territory in the west.

Asked if the government planned to recapture the Islamic State-held city of Raqqa, Assad said it was the Syrian army's role to liberate "every inch" of Syrian land and all Syria should be under state authority.

"But the question is related to when, and our priorities. This is a military matter linked to military planning and priorities," he added.

The United States is backing an alliance of militias including the Kurdish YPG in a campaign aimed ultimately at recapturing Raqqa city.

Talks cannot succeed without ceasefire — opposition

Russia, Turkey and Iran, the three foreign powers involved in the latest peace drive, plan to divide Syria into informal zones of influence under an outline deal they reached, sources told Reuters in Moscow last month.

But such a deal would still need buy-in from Assad, his opponents and, eventually, the Gulf states and Washington.

Rebel groups fighting under the "Free Syrian Army" banner have already frozen any discussion of their possible participation in the Astana talks.

The Syrian government dismisses opposition groups backed by Assad's enemies as foreign creations. In his comments to the French media, Assad asked "Who will be (in Astana) from the other side? We do not yet know. Will it be a real Syrian opposition?"

Dismissing groups he said were backed by Saudi Arabia, France and Britain, Assad said discussion of "Syrian issues" must be by Syrian groups. The main Syrian opposition umbrella group, the High Negotiations Committee, is backed by Riyadh.

HNC member Riad Nassan Agha said he had not heard of anyone being invited to the Astana talks yet.

"Syrians do not yet feel that there is a ceasefire. The battles are continuing: the attack on Wadi Barada, on (rural) western Aleppo, on Idlib, on the Ghouta (suburban area near) Damascus, Deraa," he said.

Astana "cannot succeed unless the ceasefire is implemented", he said.

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A group of elite American special operations troops on Sunday carried out a ground raid deep inside Syria to capture ISIS operatives.

US troops inserted by helicopter spent roughly 90 minutes on the ground near Deir al-Zour — about 80 miles from ISIS's so-called capital in Raqqa — before witnesses say they left carrying captured ISIS fighters and bodies, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the story.

The Pentagon confirmed that a raid had taken place, but declined to offer details.

Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the coalition, told The Post, "The coalition can confirm a US operation in the vicinity of Deir al-Zour, Jan. 8."

"The US and the entire counter-ISIL coalition will continue to pursue ISIL leaders wherever they are to ensure the security and stability of the region and our homelands," he added, using another name for the terrorist group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 25 ISIS fighters were killed during the raid, though that number has not been confirmed.

This isn't the first time US forces have conducted these types of ground raids. Though much of the focus of coalition forces has centered on retaking the Iraqi city of Mosul, the US has sent troops in to capture leaders or rescue hostages on several occasions.

One raid in October 2015 in Iraq's Kirkuk province freed dozens of hostages and resulted in the death of Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, a 39-year-old Delta Force operator who was the first American service member killed in a firefight with ISIS militants.

The US military has more than 5,000 troops on the ground in Iraq currently, a number that has steadily crept up since roughly 300 troops were deployed in June 2014 to secure the Baghdad airport.

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A Russia-led initiative involving China and Pakistan that seeks a political settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war has the makings of a diplomatic alliance that could supplant the United States as the leading power in Central Asia.

The grouping was unveiled after a third meeting in Moscow late last month and may be expanded to include regional powers Iran and Turkey, which formed a separate tripartite grouping on Syria with Russia in talks preceding the parleys on Afghanistan.

The Afghan government reacted angrily to the Moscow meeting, to which it had not been invited, because the meeting proposed the relaxation of UN restrictions on the movement of key Taliban figures involved in pre-dialogue negotiations.

This contradicted Kabul’s call in November for the UN to blacklist Taliban chief Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada because of his refusal to enter peace talks.

Instead, the tripartite talks in Moscow echoed one of two Taliban preconditions for dialogue with Kabul, reiterated by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid earlier in December. The other condition is the withdrawal of US-led Nato forces from Afghanistan.

“This is a focused attempt to deal with the aftermath of Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and an opportunity that Russia senses might have opened up for itself in Central Asia. After West Asia, it’s Central Asia where [Russian President Vladimir] Putin feels he can reassert Russian authority and China is happy to provide a helping hand,” said Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London. “However, if we take the Indo-Pacific strategic landscape, there China is the leader and Russia will have to follow China’s lead.”

The emerging quid pro quo between Moscow and Beijing comes amid uncertainty over whether US president-elect Donald Trump will endorse an agreement reached last July by leaders of the Atlantic alliance to extend financial and military support to the Afghan security forces until the end of 2020.

Since Trump’s election victory, Nato leaders have repeatedly warned an earlier withdrawal of US forces would have disastrous consequences for the Afghan government, which has lost control of significant territory to the Taliban since its forces assumed leadership of the war effort in January 2015.

At the heart of the Russian move lies a September 2014 bilateral security pact between Afghanistan and the US that allows the Pentagon to maintain nine military bases across Afghanistan after Nato forces pull out.

Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy to Afghanistan, last week said the US needed the bases to contain Russia’s resurgence as a leading player in West Asia and China’s growing influence in Asia. “Having this infrastructure as a basis, America will need two to four weeks to redeploy up to 100,000 soldiers on the same bases,” he told Anadolu news agency. “We warned Afghans from the very beginning [the security pact] may have implications for our bilateral relations if Americans use this infrastructure against our national interest.”

The tripartite talks on Afghanistan establish a forum to counter the influence of the US and its newfound security partner India, which has recently drawn close to the Afghan government after Pakistan proved unwilling to pressure, beyond a point, the Taliban leadership based on its soil to talk to Kabul.

India and the US agreed last year to allow their forces to use each other’s military bases, in response to increased Chinese activity in the Indian Ocean since President Xi Jinping assumed power in 2013.

The Indian minister of state for foreign affairs, M.J. Akbar, on Tuesday criticised the tripartite talks for excluding the Afghans, although India’s long-time friend Russia has said Kabul would be invited to participate in future meetings of the forum.

“We do not believe that holding meetings about Afghanistan alone is going the solve the problems of Afghanistan. Eventually, it is all about delivering benefits on the ground which [can be] seen by the people of Afghanistan.”

Any “political settlement has to be Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled… Nothing else is going to work in Afghanistan”.

Under Xi’s flagship “One Belt, One Road” project, an initiative to link regional economies into a China-centred trading network, China has undertaken massive infrastructure investment in Pakistan that has given it overland access to the western Indian Ocean and oil-rich Persian Gulf for the first time, via the port of Gwadar.

Chinese warships have been deployed there to provide security escorts to Chinese commercial vessels which began using the Pakistani port in November.

As in Syria, Russia is casting its increased involvement in Afghanistan in the context of the growing Islamic State (IS) presence there, which Moscow claims has been boosted by the recent arrival of 700 IS families fleeing the Middle East. The statement issued after the talks in Moscow “expressed particular concern over the increasing activity of extremist groups in the country, including the Afghan wing of [IS]”.

The Afghan interior ministry on Tuesday said IS was now active in “at least” 11 of the country’s 34 districts.

By maintaining “limited contacts” with the Taliban, facilitated by the government of Tajikistan, to halt the spread of IS activity from Afghanistan to Central Asia, Russia is moving along lines similar to Iran, its ally in Syria. The Taliban last year agreed to work to prevent the spread of IS into Iran by establishing a buffer zone in neighbouring western and northern Afghan provinces.

Much will depend on whether Trump upholds his vow to prioritise the destruction of IS and works with Putin to that end. “Putin certainly thinks he can pull off ‘another Syria’. But Afghanistan is not Syria, and where battle lines were relatively clearly drawn in Syria, there are so many internal contradictions within Afghanistan and among regional players that Russia will find it hard to manage smoothly,” warned Pant.

“Putin thinks that with China’s help, he can manage Pakistan and the Taliban. It’s a tall order and regional rivalries will be hard to manage.”

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Senior U.S. Republican and Democratic senators will introduce legislation on Tuesday seeking to impose a wide range of sanctions on Russia over its cyber activities and actions in Syria and Ukraine.

The legislation is sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain and Democrats Ben Cardin and Robert Menendez, all influential legislators on foreign policy matters. Aides said several other senators, both Democrats and Republicans, are also expected to sponsor the legislation, increasing its chances of becoming law.

According to a preliminary summary of the legislation seen by Reuters, the bill would impose visa bans and freeze the assets of people "who engage in significant activities undermining the cybersecurity of public or private infrastructure and democratic institutions" or assist in such activities.

It would also impose secondary sanctions on those who engage with the Russian defense or intelligence sectors, which could affect international companies doing business with Russia. It also puts into law sanctions on Russia that President Barack Obama imposed via executive order late last month.

U.S. lawmakers have long called for a tougher response to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region and intervention in the Syrian civil war on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Their impatience has increased since U.S. intelligence agencies said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to try to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Republican businessman Donald Trump.

The bill also sets new sanctions over Ukraine and Syria, including putting into law four executive orders from the Obama administration sanctioning Russia over its actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Among other things, it would mandate sanctions on investments of $20 million or more in Russia's ability to develop its petroleum and natural gas resources.

The bill is being introduced a day before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds its confirmation hearing for Trump's nominee to be secretary of state, former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson.

Many lawmakers from both parties have raised questions about the decades Tillerson spent working with Russia's government as an executive at the oil company, and his ties to Putin. His hearing, set for Wednesday and Thursday, is expected to largely focus on those issues.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Andrew Hay)

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After nearly six years of uprising, conflict and chaos, the partition of Syria is imminent.

President Bashar al-Assad will of course rail against it; his crucial ally Iran will probably resist too, and the marginalised US won’t even acknowledge the prospect. But the lines are nonetheless being drawn.

With pro-Assad forces back in control of Aleppo city, a newly co-operative Turkey and Russia are ready to pursue partition as a short-term resolution.

The Syrian opposition and many rebels will embrace it as their best immediate option, and the leading Kurdish political and military groups will settle for whatever autonomy they can get. If things continue shaping up this way, by the end of 2017, Syria will quite probably become a country of four parts.

The Russia- and Iran-backed Assad regime is set to hold much of the south and west, and most of Syria’s cities. There’ll most likely be a Turkish/rebel area, effectively a “safe zone”, in parts of northern Syria; the Syrian opposition will probably control Idlib province and possibly other pockets of territory in the northwest; while the Kurds will have some form of autonomy in the northeast.

A settlement like this has been a long time coming. Neither the Assad regime nor its enemies will settle for just a part of Syria, and both have survived years of intense conflict. The opposition and rebels still control territory from the north to the south; Assad clings on with the help of Russian aerial bombardments and Iranian-led ground forces. All the while, the Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) and its YPG militia are still defending territory against both IS and the Assad regime.

If the lines of a potential partition were clear some time ago, what stood in the way of recognising them was the challenge of Aleppo city. Without recapturing it, the Assad regime had no hope of claiming an economic recovery (however disingenousouly) in the areas it controlled, let alone in the entire country. But the city was surrounded by opposition-controlled territory; Assad’s military was far too depleted to change the game, and even with outside support, its campaign would be protracted.

The deal

The turning point came in August 2016 when Turkey and Russia began to reconcile. The two countries had always been on opposite sides of the conflict, Turkey supporting the opposition and rebels and Russia Assad. Their relations had been tense since November 2015, when Ankara’s jets shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border. But within a year, both saw the advantages not only of reconcilation, but of agreeing on what their respective spheres of influence in Syria should be.

A deal was quickly established: Turkey would accept the reoccupation of all of Aleppo city by pro-Assad forces, supported by Russian-Syrian siege and bombing tactics, while Moscow would accept a Turkish military intervention alongside rebels in northern Syria, including much of Aleppo province.

Which is where we are now. Civilians and rebels have been evacuated from or allowed to leave the last opposition holdouts in eastern Aleppo city. The Turkish-rebel offensive continues to push back IS, although it is facing difficulties in its assault on al-Bab, the group’s last major position in Aleppo province.

A national ceasefire, brokered by Turkey and Russia in the last days of 2016, but pro-Assad forces are breaking it in offensives near Damascus. The two countries are trying to arrange political talks between the regime and the Syrian opposition later this month in Kazakhstan.

As Andrey Kortunov, director of a think tank close to the Russian Foreign Ministry, summarised it to Reuters: “There has been a move toward a compromise … a final deal will be hard, but stances have shifted.” The same story quotes a “senior Turkish government official” explaining that the convergence “doesn’t mean we approve of Assad. But we have come to an understanding. When Islamic State is wiped out, Russia may support Turkey in Syria finishing off the PKK.”

So can the Turkish-Russian initiative win over (or put down) everyone else who has a stake in the outcome?

The obstacles

The biggest immediate challenge is in the opposition-controlled areas near Damascus. The Assad regime has already taken back many of the suburbs, but two key areas are still beyond its control: Wadi Barada to the northwest, and East Ghouta and Douma to the northeast.

Wadi Barada is home to the al-Fijah springs, which provide more than 60% of Damascus’s water. Since mid-December 2016, the Assad regime’s forces and Hezbollah have been trying to overwhelm it with bombing, shelling, and ground assaults. In the process, the pumping station for the springs has been damaged, cutting off or limiting water to about 5.5m people.

At the same time, the Syrian Army and its allied militias are trying to take more territory near Douma, which is the centre for the leading rebel faction Jaish al-Islam. Turkey is critical of the offensive, Russia is staying silent, and the Iranian government and possibly its military are backing it.

Then there’s the Syrian Kurdish movement. The PYD would like to unite its area in the northeast with a Kurdish canton in the northwest, while Turkey would like to push back any Kurdish zone of influence and elevate other Kurdish groups over the PYD.

With the Assad regime opposed to Kurdish autonomy of any sort, the only agreeable option may be containment: Turkey will probably accept a Kurdish area east of the Euphrates River, limiting any zone of control or potential military advance. The PYD, knowing it has no powerful backing, will accept the offer, even if it isolates the Kurdish area in and near Aleppo city.

As for Assad himself, the Syrian opposition continues to demand that he step down – but few others are bothering any more. The US effectively gave up the cause in 2012, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have gone quiet, and Turkey seems not to care much. He may one day be offered the chance to step down peacefully when elections are arranged, but in the meantime he will stay where he is.

Confronted with the increasingly effective Turkish-Russian axis, a US official opted for condescencion: “So this country that essentially has an economy the size of Spain, that’s Russia, is strutting around and acting like they know what they are doing. I don’t think the Turks and the Russians can [negotiate] without us.”

This is pure bluster. For three years now, Russia has been feigning co-operation with the US, and in the process has deftly manoeuvred its Western rival onto the sidelines. If Washington pushes back too hard, it could wreck its relationship with Turkey – which grants it access to key airbases – and end up framed as the main obstacle to a major breakthrough.

The events of the last seven months have only reconfirmed what’s been clear for some time: there is no optimal solution to the Syrian crisis. Partition is far from ideal, and it may only be short-term — but at this point, it’s the only viable alternative to endless slaughter, displacement, and destruction.

Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - An iconic photo of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up dead on a Turkish beach had a greater impact on fundraising efforts for Syrian refugees than hundreds of thousands of deaths, a study has shown.

The photo of Kurdi appeared in media across the world in the days after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in September 2015. His family were Syrian refugees of Kurdish origin, attempting to flee the war to Europe.

"People who had been unmoved by the relentlessly rising death toll in Syria suddenly appeared to care much more after having seen Aylan's photograph," said the report, from science research institute 'Decision Research'.

The study used fundraising data from the Swedish Red Cross, which showed a significant increase in donations after news of Kurdi's death, as well as data from Google Trends, which showed a major spike in searches for the terms "Syria" and "refugees".

Both the number of donors and the total raised increased after the photo circulated.

In the week after Kurdi's death, the study said the average number of daily donations to a Syrian refugee fund run by the Swedish Red Cross rose 100-fold. Before the photo circulated, the charity received fewer than 1,000 donations in a day; afterwards, it rose to almost 14,000.

It said the average amount raised each day by the fund was 55 times higher, netting an extra 1.9 million crowns ($210,730) per day. While the surge in interest faded quickly, long term donations did rise.

The study, authored by Paul Slovic from the University of Oregon, found the "newly created empathy waned rather quickly" after the initial burst of interest in Kurdi's story, but Kurdi's death prompted a 10-fold rise in those signing up for regular monthly donations. Only 0.02 percent of these donors had canceled by January 2016.

"The main take-home message of this paper is that emotional reactions ... can influence actual donation behavior strongly," Arvid Erlandsson, a contributor to the report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"Emotional reactions are ... prone to fade out quickly, thus resulting in sharp increases and decreases in helping behavior, despite the existing need being very stable."

Erlandsson went on to suggest that charities and governments could try harder to channel "emotional reactions" into their fundraising efforts.

The image of Kurdi joins other iconic photos that have come to symbolise human conflicts and tragedies, including Sharbat Gula, or 'Afghan Girl', whose image on the front cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985 is among the most famous of the Soviet-Afghan War.

Similarly, the 1972 image of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam came to symbolise the horrors of the Vietnam War.

Kurdi died in September 2015, along with his five-year-old brother. Their family had fled from their home in the northern Syrian town of Kobani. 

Shots of the small boy's body being cradled by a Turkish policeman circulated worldwide and galvanized several governments into policy changes, with the German government agreeing to admit thousands of refugees then stranded in Hungary only two days later.

Over 5,000 refugees were killed in 2016 while traveling across the Mediterranean, according to the Missing Migrants Project.

($1 = 9.0162 Swedish crowns)

(Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

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Syria says Israel has launched missiles that hit near a military airport west of Damascus, triggering a fire.

In a statement carried on the official news agency SANA, the military says the missiles that were launched early Friday fell in the vicinity of the Mezzeh military airport. It did not say whether there were any casualties.

It was the third such Israeli strike into Syria recently, according to the Syrian government.

On Dec. 7, the Syrian government reported Israel fired surface-to-surface missiles that also struck near Mezzeh airport. A week earlier, SANA said Israeli jets fired two missiles from Lebanese airspace toward the outskirts of Damascus, in the Sabboura area.

The Israeli military has declined to comment on those incidents, and there was no immediate comment on Friday's attack.

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(Reuters) - International investigators have said for the first time that they suspect President Bashar al-Assad and his brother are responsible for the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict, according to a document seen by Reuters.

A joint inquiry for the United Nations and global watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had previously identified only military units and did not name any commanders or officials.

Now a list has been produced of individuals whom the investigators have linked to a series of chlorine bomb attacks in 2014-15 - including Assad, his younger brother Maher and other high-ranking figures - indicating the decision to use toxic weapons came from the very top, according to a source familiar with the inquiry.

The Assads could not be reached for comment but a Syrian government official said accusations that government forces had used chemical weapons had "no basis in truth." The government has repeatedly denied using such weapons during the civil war, which is almost six years old, saying all the attacks highlighted by the inquiry were the work of rebels or the Islamic State militant group.

The list, which has been seen by Reuters but has not been made public, was based on a combination of evidence compiled by the U.N.-OPCW team in Syria and information from Western and regional intelligence agencies, according to the source, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Reuters was unable to independently review the evidence or to verify it.

The U.N.-OPCW inquiry - known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) - is led by a panel of three independent experts, supported by a team of technical and administrative staff. It is mandated by the U.N. Security Council to identify individuals and organizations responsible for chemical attacks in Syria.

Virginia Gamba, the head of the Joint Investigative Mechanism, denied any list of individual suspects had yet been compiled by the inquiry.

"There are no ... identification of individuals being considered at this time," she told Reuters by email.

The use of chemical weapons is banned under international law and could constitute a war crime.

While the inquiry has no judicial powers, any naming of suspects could lead to their prosecution. Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), but alleged war crimes could be referred to the court by the Security Council - although splits among global powers over the war make this a distant prospect at present.

"The ICC is concerned about any country where crimes are reported to be committed," a spokesman for the court said when asked for comment. "Unless Syria accepts the ICC jurisdiction, the only way that (the) ICC would have jurisdiction over the situation would be through a referral by the Security Council."

The list seen by Reuters could form the basis for the inquiry team's investigations this year, according to the source. It is unclear whether the United Nations or OPCW will publish the list separately.

'Highest levels'

The list identifies 15 people "to be scrutinized in relation to use of CW (chemical weapons) by Syrian Arab Republic Armed Forces in 2014 and 2015". It does not specify what role they are suspected of playing, but lists their titles.

It is split into three sections. The first, titled "Inner Circle President" lists six people including Assad, his brother who commands the elite 4th Armored Division, the defense minister and the head of military intelligence.

The second section names the air force chief as well as four commanders of air force divisions. They include the heads of the 22nd Air Force Division and the 63rd Helicopter Brigade, units that the inquiry has previously said dropped chlorine bombs.

The third part of the list - "Other relevant Senior Mil Personnel" - names two colonels and two major-generals.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, an independent specialist in biological and chemical weapons who monitors Syria, told Reuters the list reflected the military chain of command.

"The decisions would be made at the highest levels initially and then delegated down. Hence the first use would need to be authorized by Assad," said de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of British and NATO chemical and biological defense divisions who frequently visits Syria for professional consultancy work.

The Syrian defense ministry and air force could not be reached for comment.

Chlorine barrel bombs

Syria joined the international Chemical Weapons Convention under a U.S.-Russian deal that followed the deaths of hundreds of civilians in a sarin gas attack in Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus in August 2013.

It was the deadliest use of chemicals in global warfare since the 1988 Halabja massacre at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which killed at least 5,000 people in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Syrian government, which denied its forces were behind the Ghouta attack, also agreed to hand over its declared stockpile of 1,300 tonnes of toxic weaponry and dismantle its chemical weapons program under international supervision.

The United Nations and OPCW have been investigating whether Damascus is adhering to its commitments under the agreement, which averted the threat of U.S.-led military intervention.

The bodies appointed the panel of experts to conduct the inquiry, and its mandate runs until November. The panel published a report in October last year which said Syrian government forces used chemical weapons at least three times in 2014-2015 and that Islamic State used mustard gas in 2015.

The October report identified Syria's 22nd Air Force Division and 63rd Helicopter Brigade as having dropped chlorine bombs and said people "with effective control in the military units ... must be held accountable".

The source familiar with the inquiry said the October report had clearly established the institutions responsible and that the next step was to go after the individuals.

Washington on Thursday blacklisted 18 senior Syrian officials based on the U.N.-OPCW inquiry's October report - some of whom also appear on the list seen by Reuters - but not Assad or his brother.

The issue of chemical weapons use in Syria has become a deeply political one, and the U.N.-OPCW inquiry's allegations of chlorine bomb attacks by government forces have split the U.N. Security Council's veto-wielding members.

The United States, Britain and France have called for sanctions against Syria, while Assad's ally Russia has said the evidence presented is insufficient to justify such measures.

A Security Council resolution would be required to bring Assad and other senior Syrian officials before the International Criminal Court for any possible war crimes prosecution - something Russia would likely block.

(Additional reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut; Editing by Pravin Char)

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During his confirmation hearing earlier this week, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of state articulated his strategy for defeating ISIS in Syria — and it sounded very similar to what the Obama administration has been doing since the terror group established itself in the country.

Former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that he thinks the US should focus on wiping out the terrorist group ISIS in Syria before figuring out what to do about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The civil war in Syria has been raging on for almost six years as rebels — some of whom are Islamic terrorists — fight to oust Assad, whose brutal regime has been responsible for more civilian deaths than any terror group in the country.

"We've had two competing priorities in Syria under this administration: 'Bashar al-Assad must go' and the defeat of ISIS," Tillerson said. "And the truth of the matter is, carrying both of those out simultaneously is extremely difficult because at times they conflict with one another."

He continued: "The clear priority is to defeat ISIS. We defeat ISIS, we at least create some level of stability in Syria which then lets us deal with the next priority of what is going to be the exit of Bashar al-Assad."

But while the Obama administration has indeed called for Assad to step down, the US has not made his ouster a priority. And when President Barack Obama had the chance to act on a red line he set forth in 2012, he ended up deciding not to take military action against Assad.

The clear priority for the US in Syria over the past few years has always been defeating ISIS.

"I don't see any big daylight between what Tillerson said and what Obama's administration has been doing," Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and Yale University who was the US ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014, told Business Insider.

Ford noted that for the last two and a half years of US involvement in Syria, "it's been abundantly clear that the Islamic State is the heavy priority and not the Assad government."

Many Syria experts say this is misguided because ISIS' presence in Syria is fostered by Assad's continued hold on power.

"The key problems we face center on the effects of Assad regime mass homicide: a recruiting bonanza for Islamist extremists, spillover effects that embolden Russia and hurt allies, and the signature humanitarian abomination (to date) of the 21st century," Fred Hof, a former special adviser for transition in Syria under Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, told Business Insider in an email. 

"This is why a strategy that separates Assad and ISIS would be doomed to failure," he added. "Assad and ISIS are joined at the hip."

The Assad regime theoretically fights ISIS, and vice versa, but the real targets for destruction in Syria are the moderate rebel groups whose primary goal is to oust Assad.

Assad knows that ISIS and Al Qaeda-backed groups in Syria will never be able to rule the country legitimately because the West will never work with them. Therefore, the real threat to Assad come from the rebels whom the West could in theory support.

Because of this dynamic, the Assad regime and its allies aren't going to completely wipe out radical extremist groups as long as moderate rebels are still fighting.

But extremist groups are still fighting the Assad regime, and because they are often better equipped than other rebel groups, Syrians who are desperate to oust Assad join up out of practicality. Assad's regime also allowed ISIS to grow and prosper in the first place.

"The connection between Assad's atrocities against mainly Sunni Arab civilians and the ability of ISIS and other Islamist extremists to recruit and prosper is well-established," said Hof, who is now the director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council. 

Hof continued: "What's been lacking is a strategy that recognizes and acts upon the linkage — the symbiotic relationship — between a murderous Assad regime and the extremist groups it has helped spawn."

Ford said the solution to the crisis in Syria has to be both military and political.

"A lot of experts would say Assad's government itself has created a lot of the conditions that spur recruitment into Islamic terrorist groups," he said. "The problem is not so much military as it is political having to do with grievances against a brutal, repressive government."

Ford said he think it has "always made more sense to prioritize Assad over the Islamic State."

One victor in the Syrian civil war has been Russia, a country that has been increasingly hostile to the US. Russia entered the fray in Syria in 2015 to support the Assad regime. Since then, the Russian military has helped the regime win a series of victories against anti-Assad rebels.

While Russia initially said it was intervening in Syria to fight ISIS, it has become clear that bolstering the Assad regime is its real priority.

Tillerson himself noted that the Syrian civil war "has provided a convenient open door for Russia to now establish a presence in the Middle East, a region that it has long been absent from."

Iran, another country that is no friend to the US, has also been exerting its influence in Syria to support Assad.

Tillerson also insisted that the US must have a plan for who would replace Assad if he were to be forced from power.

"We need to answer the question, what comes next? What is going to be the government structure in Syria, and can we have any influence over that or not?" Tillerson asked.

Hof disagreed with this sentiment.

"Although it is troubling to assign stabilizing qualities to a mass murderer, the issue of who ultimately replaces Assad is a bit of a red herring: he has all-but-destroyed a state and there has been no American effort to overthrow him," he said. "Besides, did the world agonize in 1945 over who would replace Hitler?"

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NOW WATCH: 11 facts that show how different Russia is from the rest of the world

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's foreign minister says that Moscow is inviting representatives of the incoming U.S. administration to attend upcoming Syria talks in Kazakhstan.

Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference Tuesday that Russia is encouraged by President-elect Donald Trump's focus on combating terrorism.

He voiced hope that Russian and U.S. experts could start discussions on fighting terrorism in Syria, in Kazakhstan's capital when Syrian government and opposition representatives meet for talks on Monday.

He said "we hope that the new administration will be able to accept that proposal," adding that the talks in Astana will offer "the first opportunity to discuss a more efficient fight against terrorism in Syria."

Lavrov said that Russia expects that cooperation on settling the Syrian crisis will be more productive than it was with the Obama administration.

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Democratic congresswoman and Iraq war veteran Tulsi Gabbard recently traveled to Syria's capital, Foreign Policy reported on Wednesday.

Gabbard's spokeswoman described her trip as a "fact-finding" mission, telling Foreign Policy that Gabbard "felt it was important to meet with a number of individuals and groups including religious leaders, humanitarian workers, refugees and government and community leaders.”

It is unclear if she met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while she was there. 

On December 8, Gabbard — a vocal opponent of the Obama administration's calls for Assad to relinquish power — introduced to Congress the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would prohibit the US government from funding or arming extremist groups like Jabbhat Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The bill would also halt support to members of the Islamist rebel coalition Levant Front, or Jabhat al-Shamiyah, which includes factions linked to the US-backed Free Syrian Army.

Gabbard met with President-elect Donald Trump in late November to discuss how to avoid "the drumbeats of war" that may lead to US intervention in Syria, among other national security concerns.

"Where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement," Gabbard said in a statement about the meeting. "However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives."

Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, recently recaptured Syria's largest city, Aleppo, from rebel groups who had held on to it for nearly four years. The regime has now refocused much of its efforts on recapturing the suburbs outside of Syria's capital, Damascus, in the country's southwest. 

Gabbard's spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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