Opinion | Ten years later, the Syrian revolution is not over

Now, 10 years later, Biden is back in the White House — this time as president — and despite what you may have heard, the Syrian revolution continues. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Assad has won the war and that there’s nothing the United States can do, so we should do essentially nothing. In fact, though, the Syrian people never stopped fighting — and their suffering has never ceased.

Assad and his Russian and Iranian partners control roughly two-thirds of the country, ruling his rump state with brute force and still trying to starve or bomb the rest of Syria into submission. Inside the areas Assad controls, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians rot away in his dungeons, tortured and murdered for no reason.

But as hopeless as it all seems, the Syrians who are still fighting for freedom from Assad say there’s a lot the international community can still do. The Syrian people believed it when Biden and others promised to stand with anyone brave enough to stand up for their rights, said Qutaiba Idlbi, the U.S. representative of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces.

“We are here today because that promise by the international community has not been fulfilled,” he said at an event Thursday hosted by the Holocaust museum, the Syrian Emergency Task Force and the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation. “We need the United States to take back its international leadership role.”

The key effort now should be to support Syrians who refuse to live under Assad’s rule, he said. That includes more than 6 million internally displaced civilians living in Syria’s northwest or northeast, 3 million civilians living in hard-to-reach or besieged areas, according to the United Nations, plus 5.6 million Syrians living as refugees in other countries.

Imagine if the United States led an international effort to help those Syrians Assad doesn’t rule over by giving them supplies, pandemic relief and economic support, while using sanctions smartly to deny Assad the ability to profit from his crimes or replenish his war machine. That would actually increase Syrians’ leverage with the regime to negotiate a just peace and boost Washington’s leverage when dealing with Moscow or Tehran.

“They have voted with their feet,” Qutaiba said. “They have decided not to live under the Assad regime.” For that reason, he said, they deserve all the backing we can give them.

The United States can also drastically expand its support for the various international efforts to hold the Assad regime and its partners accountable for their war crimes. Russia’s long abuse of its U.N. Security Council veto power has rendered the International Criminal Court a dead end. But there are criminal and civil cases in several countries, as more and more torture survivors escape and tell their stories.

As president, Biden has said practically nothing about Syria. His administration’s only action on the issue has been to bomb a couple of warehouses used by Iranian-linked militias in response to an attack on U.S. troops in Iraq.

The first priority of the Biden administration should be to declare clearly that the United States remains…