Starved into Submission: Siege Doctrine from Syria to Mariupol (Part 1)

[Rebecca Bakos Blumenthal is Starvation and Humanitarian Crisis Lead at Global Rights Compliance.

Elise Lauriot Prevost is a legal advisor with Global Rights Compliance.]

I. Introduction

In February 2022, as Russian forces encircled Mariupol and began systematically severing its electricity, water, and food supply, many observers described what was unfolding as unprecedented: a European city of nearly half a million people, deliberately starved into submission. It was not unprecedented. Those who had watched Syria over the preceding decade recognised the playbook immediately. The encirclement, the targeting of hospitals and distribution points, the announced humanitarian corridors that were never safe to use and the blocking of international relief organisations were not improvised responses to the chaos of war. They were a method, field-tested and refined, applied again in a new theatre with heavier firepower and in compressed time.

This article traces that doctrinal line, from the siege of Yarmouk camp in southern Damascus to the siege of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and argues that siege warfare and the deliberate starvation of civilians are not collateral consequences of armed conflict but calculated instruments of it. More precisely, they are instruments whose repeated use has been enabled, and whose future use continues to be facilitated, by a near-total lack of accountability. The Syrian sieges generated reams of documentation, condemnation, and UN Security Council resolutions, all of which Russia vetoed. No senior commander responsible for the starvation of Yarmouk, Madaya, or Eastern Ghouta has faced criminal prosecution. That impunity did not go unnoticed. It was, in a meaningful sense, a permissive condition for what came next.

The structure of this article follows the logic of that transfer. Section II sets out the anatomy of modern siege warfare and the legal framework that governs its conduct. Section III examines Russia’s role in Syria’s sieges, with particular attention to the pattern of starvation tactics that emerged over the course of the conflict. Section IV analyses the siege of Mariupol as the direct application of that doctrine, drawing on the findings of a year-long investigation by Global Rights Compliance. Section V addresses the structural impunity that has permitted this pattern to repeat.

II. The Anatomy of Modern Siege Warfare

Siege warfare is among the oldest instruments of armed conflict, but its contemporary form has been refined into something more precise and more deliberately calibrated, with devastating effects on the civilian population. Examples ranging from Sarajevo, Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta, to southern Damascus in Syria, Ta’izz in Yemen, Tigray, Mariupol, Gaza, and El-Fasher in Sudan, demonstrate the consequences such military operations continue to inflict on civilians. Modern sieges are not primarily about starving out a defending army, rather, they are structured around a sequential logic in which the breaking of civilian will becomes the necessary predicate to any eventual enemy surrender.

The tactical logic that plays out in contemporary sieges is consistent across theatres: encircle the population, sever supply lines, manipulate and obstruct humanitarian relief, and systematically dismantle and destroy the infrastructure that is indispensable to sustain life. These are not the incidental consequences of armed conflict. They are the mechanism.

While the use of siege warfare is not prohibited per se and is lawful insofar as it is directed exclusively against combatants, siege tactics have repeatedly been employed in urban environments and in densely populated civilian areas. In relation to the siege of Sarajevo, the ICTY Trial Chamber in Milosevic held that it was a ‘siege in the sense that it was a military operation, characterized by a persistent attack or campaign … during which the civilian population was denied regular access to food, water, medicine and other essential supplies, and deprived of its right to leave the city freely at its own will and pace.’

The four pillars of the modern siege doctrine, encirclement, starvation, humanitarian access denial and the destruction of critical infrastructure, operate to mutually reinforce one another. Encirclement establishes control of the perimeter and denies resupply or evacuation except at the discretion of the besieging force. Checkpoints are established to restrict or entirely deny the entry of food, water, medicine and other essential necessities, exerting mounting pressure on the civilian population. Humanitarian access and offers of relief, often framed as gestures of restraint, function in practice as another tactic of warfare: humanitarian corridors and evacuation routes are announced, but made inaccessible, life-threatening, or conditional on surrender. Finally, these are compounded by the destruction of hospitals and healthcare facilities, water infrastructure, and power stations, forcing civilians into a calculus between survival and surrender.

While a comprehensive analysis of the legal framework governing siege warfare falls outside the scope of this article and has been addressed elsewhere (here and here), a brief account of the applicable rules is necessary.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which codifies the rules applicable during armed conflict, regulates and restricts the conduct of warring parties during encirclement operations. Siege tactics must be conducted in compliance with relevant rules under IHL, including the principle of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. One of the cornerstone provisions related to the protection of civilians in siege scenarios is the prohibition of starvation, codified in Article 54 of Additional Protocol I (API) for international armed conflicts (IAC) and in Article 14 of Additional Protocol II (APII) for non-international armed conflicts (NIAC), which prohibits depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival (OIS). The prohibition also forms part of Customary International Humanitarian Law and applies regardless of conflict classification.

OIS is an open-ended concept. IHL offers a non-exhaustive list including foodstuffs, agricultural areas, crops, livestock, drinking water installations, and irrigation works. In addition to certain objects that are intrinsically indispensable, such as food and water, OIS may also be situationally indispensable, depending on the climate, territorial variances, characteristics of the affected communities, and the public health situation, amongst others. Situationally indispensable objects might include heating and warm clothing in the winter, infant formula, insulin for diabetic patients, healthcare infrastructure, and humanitarian aid and delivery where civilians are not otherwise adequately provided for. Deprivation can take many forms, in that any conduct restricting civilians’ use of OIS may qualify as deprivation, including wilfully impeding humanitarian operations and relief supplies or rendering them useless. Deprivation may also result from rendering critical infrastructure useless, such as attacks on electricity plants which provide both heat and power to water pumping stations and hospitals.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court also criminalises the intentional use of starvation as a method of warfare, initially only applicable to IACs. The accountability gap was closed in 2019, when the Rome Statute was amended to include the war crime’s counterpart for NIACs.

The gap between the legal prohibition and its enforcement is not a technicality. It is the terrain on which siege warfare has been repeatedly waged against civilian populations without meaningful consequence. The sections that follow examine two cases: Syria and Ukraine. In both cases, starvation was used as a method of warfare, the documentation of the conduct is extensive, and accountability has remained, to date, largely aspirational. Understanding why that gap persists, and what it enables, is the central purpose of this article.

III. Siege Tactics in Syria

Russia did not invent Syria’s siege economy. The Assad government had been encircling, starving, and bombing civilian populations for years before Russian forces formally entered the conflict in September 2015. But Russia’s military intervention transformed the scale, the precision, and the impunity with which those tactics were applied. What had been a brutal but sometimes contested set of practices became, with Russian air power and Russian diplomatic cover, a systematic and largely unimpeded method of warfare. Syria became, in the most operative sense of that phrase, a testing ground.

From the early onset of the armed conflict in Syria, the Assad regime used siege tactics as its primary instrument to capture opposition held territory and enclaves. Across nearly 15 years of conflict, the Syrian regime’s use of starvation and siege warfare became the hallmark of the conflict, through what became widely known as the “kneel or starve” strategy, which included widespread bombardment of urban areas, the systematic denial and obstruction of humanitarian access, the destruction of objects indispensable to civilian survival, and the manipulation of evacuation corridors, until life within besieged areas became untenable and opposition armed groups agreed to negotiate, forcing their capitulation. According to the COI, the Syrian regime, starting from 2012:

“began laying sieges in a coordinated and planned manner, aimed at forcing populations, collectively, to starve or surrender.”

The four-pillar logic described above was part and parcel of the tactics deployed across areas including Damascus, Eastern Ghouta, Homs, Madaya and Zabadani, and parts of Aleppo, amongst others.

The COI has found, that such sieges followed a similar pattern:

“[first,] the encirclement of an area, including the setting up of checkpoints at all access points; [second,] the imposition of a siege, including preventing the flow of food, medical supplies, and sometimes water and electricity, into the town or area; [third,] the shelling and aerial bombardment of the besieged area; [and finally,] the arrest, and often disappearance, of wounded persons attempting to leave the besieged area to seek medical treatment no longer available inside and of those attempting to break the siege, usually by smuggling in food and medical supplies.”

Together, these tactics allowed the Syrian regime and its allies to effectively destroy, remove or render useless all means of sustaining civilian life, from supply lines necessary for accessing food or supplying bakeries, to electricity and clean drinking water, to healthcare infrastructure and desperately needed medical care.  The end of the sieges was typically marked by the adoption of so-called reconciliation agreements, quite a few of which were brokered by Russia, by which opposition armed groups, together with their families and other civilians of dissenting opinions, would be removed from the besieged areas. Significantly, healthcare workers and activists often did not have the possibility to take part in reconciliation. These so-called reconciliation agreements effectively resulted in the forcible displacement those who did not align with the Syrian regime.

Russia’s formal military intervention, from September 2015 onwards, added decisive strength and air power to that architecture. In eastern Aleppo, Syrian and Russian air forces participated directly in the reduction of eastern Aleppo, which fell in December 2016 following a prolonged siege in which both the Syrian regime and Russian forces were found to have conducted attacks on humanitarian facilities, convoy and personnel, as well as hospitals and other protected sites. Pro-government forces in Aleppo further prevented the entrapped civilian population from accessing food and basic supplies. In Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the capital Damascus, that during the siege counted approximately 400,000 civilians, the COI found that the Syrian government, supported by Russian air operations, had subjected the population to a sustained campaign of deliberate starvation: food supplies and humanitarian aid were systematically blocked, resulting in severe and acute malnutrition among the civilian population, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including markets and hospitals further compounded the humanitarian crisis. The COI’s own summary of Syria’s broader siege record captured the characteristics of the regime’s tactics with precision, describing civilians enduring:

“modern day sieges in which perpetrators deliberately starved the population along medieval scripts and indefensible and shameful restrictions on humanitarian aid.”

The dual role Russia played across the Syrian conflict, as a warring party intervening in support of the Syrian regime, and simultaneously shielding the latter from accountability, was entirely visible at the UN Security Council. Resolutions seeking to mandate humanitarian access to besieged areas were consistently vetoed or watered down and politicised. In May 2014, Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have referred the situation in Syria to the ICC. In February 2017, Russia and China vetoed a resolution that would have imposed sanctions over chemical weapons attacks. Having exercised its veto repeatedly and systematically for over a decade, Russia effectively insulated the Syrian regime’s conduct from accountability.

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash