FOUR and a half years after the popular uprising began in Syria in March 2011 against the bloody dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad — which began as peaceful protests against the regime — we are seeing the humanitarian tragedy of thousands of Syrians risking their lives to escape to Europe. With 250,000 already killed in Syria by all sides, more than four million Syrian refugees outside the country and more than 10 million internally displaced, the catastrophe of killing does not seem to be ending.

Instead of pressuring Assad to step down and negotiate a cease-fire and a transition to a new government without him, so as to remove the main reason for this unprecedented exodus of refugees to Europe, some critics, most of them Islamophobic and envious of the rich Arab countries, decided to point fingers at the Gulf countries for allegedly not accepting Syrian refugees.

Amnesty International published a Middle East map on the Internet showing how many refugees each country in the region had accepted. Tiny Lebanon has more than 1.1 million, almost two million are in Turkey and Jordan has around 700,000. For each of the Gulf countries, the human rights group put “zero.” The truth is a bit more complicated than this reductionism that is good for angering western public opinion, but does not tell the real story.

The government of Saudi Arabia reacted slowly to the allegations, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs finally released an official statement in English on its website on Sept. 13 saying that the Kingdom had received approximately 2.5 million Syrians since 2011.

“In order to ensure their safety and dignity, the Kingdom adopted a policy that does not treat them as refugees or place them in refugee camps,” the statement said. “They have been given the freedom to move about the country, and those who wish to remain in Saudi Arabia (some hundreds of thousands) have been given legal residency status like the remaining residents. Their residency comes with the rights to receive free medical care, to join the labor market and to attend schools and universities. This was contained in a royal decree in 2012 that instructed public schools to accept Syrian students. According to government statistics, the public school system has accepted more than 100,000 Syrian students.”

In addition, the Saudi government recalled that it has already given $700 million in financial aid for Syrian refugees, particularly those in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. This aid included providing food, materials for housing, medical treatment in Saudi clinics in refugee camps and the payment of rent for a large number of Syrian families living in Lebanon and in Syria.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi writing in the Al-Hayat newspaper said that the Syrian refugees were going to Europe in droves because they want to put down roots in countries where they can become citizens.

As Khashoggi points out, the Gulf states already have too many foreign workers that often outnumber their native populations, especially in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar where foreigners outnumber the locals by 5 to 1. He also says that Gulf economies are having difficulty in finding enough jobs for their own citizens who need to work. This is a serious problem in Saudi Arabia where the government has been enforcing a Saudization program for years, but that is encountering a lot of resistance from the private sector, which prefers hiring foreigners with lower wages and who work more.

Instead of applying pressure on Assad to negotiate a permanent cease-fire in Syria, his allies, the Russians and the Iranians, are stepping up their military aid to support a brutal regime that continues to kill hundreds of Syrians every week with vicious attacks using barrel bombs that are dropped from helicopters. Now we have the expansion of a military base near Latakia in Syria, an Alawite stronghold of the regime, by the Russians. This Russian support is crucial for Assad to continue to believe he can remain in power, even if only over a small part of the old Syria.

Meanwhile, Daesh still occupies much of the north and east of the country and it is the poor Syrian civilians who remain trapped between the two sides.

n The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.