What can be done about Syria and the Syrian people?

[UncoordinatedPisces]

[quote="it means no worries"]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35667858

What a suprise...A whole chunk of the immigrants realised that Europe is a far better opportunity for them and so they "vanished" into society never to be found again. Knew that'd happen.[/quote]

There is a difference between an immigrant and an asylum seeker. Immigrant implies they moved there because they wanted to, not because they had to. As for the article; it is odd how so many could fall off the radar and it does need to be addressed.

[it means no worries]

That's what I was stressing in the earlier posts on this thread-many of these people are not asylum seekers-they are economic migrants.

[KopsTheTerminator]

Regardless of anyone's stance on the issue I think we can all agree that this is a grim time for Europe.

[Amur_Tiger]

The basic imperative in Syria is to stop the war, the Civil War has thusfar claimed on the low end 300 thousand lives and there's estimates that range pretty close to half a million. This is orders of magnitude more carnage then anything that's happened previously, never-mind the millions displaced.

The trouble has been a desire to 'pick the winner', which has led to a lot of support to various opposition groups, none of which ever managed to be as strong or stable as the government. In prolonging the conflict we've seen the groups that initially worked together splinter and fragment into a real mess of various factions. The major groups being the government, the kurds, ISIS and others.

The government is led by Assad and most strongly supported by certain ethnic minorities that are terrified of what might happen if someone topples the government. They're supported by Iran and Russia and opposed by the US/West/Turkey.

The kurds have been supported by the US/West for a long time and have been trying to carve a homeland out for themselves in Iraq first ( back in the Gulf War even ) then more recently in Iraq and Syria. As they come closer to success they've managed to get the Turks worried enough to start bombing them as Turkey also has a significant Kurdish population and they don't want any of that homeland to come out of Turkey. This has left the Syrian kurds drifting towards alignment with the government, also they have no desire to take over all of Syria.

ISIS, really crazy fundamentalists, specifically Sunnis but needless to say they don't speak for all Sunnis, just means they have a particular chip on their shoulder when it comes to dealing with Shia Muslims. Officially nobody likes these guys, unofficially the Saudis and US both considered them useful in putting pressure on the government in early days, the behavior of ISIS has disabused them of that notion.

Other. You really can't call the rest anything else, certainly there are rebels among them, but there's also Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups and everyone in this category exists in a shifting web of alliances where they work together against one of the other three major groups only to fight each other the next day.

It should be obvious that all of these guys have downsides to them, but with the aim of stopping the fighting the government is the clear winner and I think Russian efforts to shore up the government last fall are the main reason why there's serious ( but very tricky ) peace talks these days.

[zerodix]

as a Dutch citizen, I have a pretty clear view of the matter, it may sound unkind, but I would say, close the borders and send them back to the other European countries. I've been homeless (I crushed at several places, but lost my house in january 2015 due to illness of my expartner) and it took me a long while to have a new place to stay. Since a week I have a small appartment above a garage where I can stay for at least 5 years.
I've read/seen the news, and my experience is, that it is a lot of propaganda, from the Dutch government (I cannot speak for the other European countries because I lack the knowledge about their input/actions in this matter)
The Dutch government denies that there are economic refugees amongst them, there have been a lot of very violent "incidents" (our government seriously calls these incidents, no joke) Also, and this is the point that states my opinion:
-we have NO money and no space to live enough. Even without the refugees we have severe problems for house-seeking people.. then us Dutch people have to wait very long if we subscribe for housing, and the refugees get a special treatment, get help when they have this "status" and are helped by finding a fitting home.
Me? Oh, I'm just a "Dutch" person. Had to figure everything out by myself. "rent a room" was an advice they gave me.
Refugees? With Iphones, islamism and expesive clothes? Gonna take a lot of propaganda to wipe that out.