The UN’s confirmation recently of a polio outbreak in northern Syria shows that more than just violence is metastasizing inside Syria’s borders and spilling beyond them. Yet the disease is likely to spread much farther afield than has Syria’s instability. In a recent Lancet article, Martin Eichner and Stefan O. Brockmann write that polio from Syria could spread to Europe, with European countries with low vaccination coverage—such as Austria, Ukraine, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—being particularly at-risk of a sustained outbreak.

The highly communicable disease puts at risk an estimated half-million Syrian children, who have not been vaccinated because of the civil war. It already threatens Syria’s immediate neighbors, all of whom, except for Israel, are hosting massive Syrian refugee populations. The UN announced November 8 that the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have already begun a program to vaccinate 20 million children in Syria and neighboring countries, the largest-ever immunization response in the region.

Polio was eradicated in Syria fourteen years ago—ironically enough, shortly before Bashar al Assad came to power after his father’s death in mid-2000. On November 4, the younger Assad’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, pledged that his government will work with international organizations to ensure that all children in Syria, even those in rebel-held areas, are vaccinated, although he neglected to mention when the campaign would begin, or how it would be conducted in areas contested or no longer controlled by the government. “We intend to vaccinate each Syrian child regardless of the area they are present in, whether it is a hotspot or a place where the Syrian Arab Army is present,” he said. “We promise that we will give opportunity to humanitarian organizations to reach every Syrian child.”

To discuss the anti-Assad opposition’s reaction to this pledge, I spoke with Louay Mokdad, spokesman for the Supreme Military Council (SMC), an umbrella opposition grouping that includes the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Ashley Frohwein: Does the SMC consider credible the Assad regime’s recent claim that it will facilitate the vaccination of all Syrian children against polio?

Louay Mokdad: First of all, for us in the SMC, in the Free Syrian Army, we are open to any kind of helping any Syrian people, especially the civilians and especially the women and children. Anything that will help our people, we are supportive of and encourage the international community to find a solution, especially for the women and the children the refugees outside Syria and inside Syria in the camps and the others who are in the cities and the areas which are under siege by the Bashar al Assad regime.

But our problem about this offer is that we believe Bashar al Assad is lying and this regime has no credibility at all, and we don’t believe anything that he’s doing, he’s doing for the Syrian people’s interests or to protect the Syrian people. And the most important thing before he lied and said he wants to help the Syrian people’s children: it would be very good if he stopped killing them every day. Bashar Assad is the same person who gave the orders to use the chemical weapons in Damascus province, which killed more than seven hundred women and children there. The total was 1,400; more than half of them were women and children. So we think it’s a good idea for the international community to ask Bashar al Assad to stop killing the children before he make this new lie that he wants to protect the children.

AF: Does the SMC have any position towards international calls, by the UN and Save the Children, for potential ‘vaccination ceasefires’?

LM: About this, the Free Syrian Army and the SMC and all the revolutionary forces, they are protecting themselves, which means they are not using or shooting guns because they want or like to do that. The Syrian people, they were all of their lives, seven thousand years ago until now, peaceful people; there were not any problems in Syria between the Syrian people. So the problem today, when some are asking for a ceasefire, [is that] the revolution is on the ground and rebels on the ground, they are protecting their areas. They are trying to make Bashar al Assad step away, to finish this regime because he is killing our people and he is destroying our country. And he’s responsible for about more than 150,000 deaths and more than eight million refugees.

We are not interested in any complete ceasefire, but we told all the governments and all the international community, we will cooperate with any international community team to investigate the chemical [attacks], to investigate the crimes, to help our people. We said before this [Muslim] holiday of ‘Eid [al Adha] that lasts three days, when the Arab League asked for a ceasefire, [that] we are ready for a ceasefire, especially in the areas under the siege. We are not… we will not for sure cooperate with any complete ceasefire, but we will cooperate with anything that takes off the pressure Bashar al Assad is putting on the areas under siege and the other areas. We will cooperate with any humanitarian aid [organization] from the international community. We did and we will do again any ceasefire to make sure that aid will go to the cities and to the people who need this, and we will follow any ceasefire that lasts for a short period of time, to make sure that the people will be safe and the United Nations team will be safe. And we will protect them in our area, as we did always. Two-and-a-half years until now, we have protected the international teams because we believe [in] international law and we believe in our revolution’s goals of freedom and liberty and equality and this kind of stuff. So, we protected the Annan team, and the chemical weapons mission; every mission that has come to Syria from the international community, we are cooperating with them and we are protecting them, and that’s what we will do always.

So anything that will help our people, we will cooperate with. But a complete ceasefire with the regime, this is something impossible. This is something we can’t do, because we will not sell our people’s blood after we paid 150,000 persons—people lost their lives; for sure we are not going to sell our peoples’ blood. But in any specific areas, limited ceasefires just to make the situation better in the areas under siege and to help our people who are under the siege who are dying without food, without medical [care], without other support, for sure we will do limited ceasefires in these areas if that will help the international community to send aid inside these areas. But I have to remind all the world about this: who’s making the siege, who’s making our people die inside these areas, is Bashar al Assad. Bashar al Assad is making this siege and he is launching and bombing these areas two-and-a-half years until now by Scud missiles, by ballistic missiles, by chemical weapons, by all kinds of weapons—he is the one who is destroying these areas. But until now, we are still saying that we will cooperate with the international community, we will cooperate with all international community decisions, and we will cooperate just to help our people even if, as much as it would be small help, we will cooperate about this help.

AF: With the polio outbreak in Syria, which looks likely to spread to other countries, is the SMC requesting any additional financial support or any other type of assistance, whether from the US or others, to help deal with the polio cases in rebel-held areas or in any other areas?

LM: Sure. We are asking the West always to help us organize ourselves more and make ourselves, to make the Free Syrian Army stronger, because it’s in the Syrian people’s interest and even the West[’s interests]; we share this interest with the West, because with the Free Syrian Army, the situation is good in areas they control, and [this] is helping our people. That will be a better situation [in terms of] our battle with the regime. And that also will help us to be more effective, to not let extremists control the areas, or have all this power in our areas.

And nobody was listening to us. For two years now, we are asking them to just to help us to organize ourselves more, to make ourselves stronger in the liberated areas. And we are getting just 2 percent of the aid that we need, of the supplies that we need. They are giving us nothing [while] complaining about the regime’s resources from Iran and Russia. And they are giving us nothing and then they ask, why are the extremists in Syria strong today? That’s because the West left us alone. We believe in democracy, we believe in being a liberal country, we believe in equality between all the Syrian people. But they left us alone, between Bashar al Assad’s militias and Iran and Hezbollah on the first side, and the extremist groups from ISIS and the other extremist groups who belong to al Qaeda on the other side. We are fighting both of them now and we are alone. The West is giving us nothing; it is giving us just 2 percent from what we are asking for help.