Hindsight may not turn out 20/20 when it comes to Syria, as the true extent of the damage may not become apparent for years given the dimensions involved, from the destruction of cities to the less evident effects of the traumatizing of children and young adults — or their indoctrination or orientation to combat and the black hurricanes of war.
For this post: the briefest survey of how dismal and evil Syria’s civil war has been.
Today, there are Syrian children certain to grow up as the immigrants and refugees of war.
For tens upon tens of thousands of Syrians, were peace to arrive tomorrow (let’s not even go there today), there would be not only no homes to return to but no businesses or communities either. War has erased their past lives and the artifacts and furnishings attending them.
For Syria or portions of it, I think we’re short today on the environmental and natural history stories, but perhaps it’s not for the conservationists, as a rule, to throw themselves into still burning conflicts to sample air and water quality and note the health of overlooked habitats.
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Aleppo Tourism and Vacations: 18 Things to Do in Aleppo, Syria | TripAdvisor as viewed 9/18/2013.
While the search engine listed the page date of the above as 2007, the “Travel Alert: Security Concerns” notice proved right up to date. One could walk at leisure around ancient ruins in Aleppo just six years ago; some day, one hopes soon, one may do the same around the latest in modern ones.
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Combat
A senior U.N. diplomat in New York says details on scale of the attack, the rockets used and trajectory data cited in the report make it “abundantly clear” that the Syrian regime was behind the attack. The diplomat said: “There isn’t a shred of evidence in the other direction.”
AP top news headlines | Tampa Bay Times “UN report suggests regime behind sarin attack,” 9/18/2013
The UN Chemical Weapons Report: One Third of the Story that Needs to Be Told | Center for Strategic and International Studies 9/17/2013
Perhaps the most besieged parties in Syria will turn out the forces that launched sarin-loaded warheads from sites on Mount Qasioun.
On the war crimes front, both UN reports and “western” diplomacy seems to be closing in on Damascus today and its specific higher elevation defenses.
The New York Times’ C.J. Chivers and Human Rights Watch’s Josh Lyons, a satellite imagery specialist, examined details buried in the U.N. report released Tuesday that concluded definitively chemical weapons were used in Syria without implicating either side. Both came to the same conclusion through separate, independent investigations: the rockets carrying sarin gas were fired from Syria’s Mount Qasioun . . . .
The U.N.’s Case Against Syria Is Hidden in the Details – Connor Simpson – The Atlantic Wire 9/18/2013
Rocket trajectory links Syrian military to attack 9/18/2013 AP
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BEIRUT — The prisoners are crammed together in small, dark rooms with no water or electricity and barely enough food to survive. Diseases such as scabies and tuberculosis are rampant among them. Every so often, the crash of artillery shells rocks their sprawling prison complex, a stark reminder of the civil war raging outside.
In Syria’s Aleppo prison, thousands of inmates caught in war’s deadly stalemate – The Washington Post 9/18/2013
In the conventional war fighting realm, Syria’s prisoners have been made prisoners of the war as much as of the state. Theirs is truly a state of siege with state forces defending the prison and keeping them and rebel forces attacking the prison and claiming intentions to free them. While fate, God, nature, machinery, and politics squat like The Thinker on their stony lives, the war gets to them anyway, and according to the AP story, by way of shelling, lack of medicine, and possibly execution by guards (“opposition groups say”).
Also: Syria: Aleppo prisoners caught in deadly stalemate – Washington Times 9/18/2013
Pentagon proposes plan to equip and train ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels — RT USA 9/19/2013 (only on the web may I relay tomorrow’s early news). 🙂
Pentagon proposes training moderate Syrian rebels – CNN.com 9/19/2013
Related background: The Non-State Militant Landscape in Syria | Combating Terrorism Center at West Point 8/27/2013
Economics
The closure of factories, disrupted communications, rising unemployment, a growing shadow economy, prices increases, and a serious shortage of many vital goods and services have accompanied the upheaval in Syria. Since government resources are being depleted, the economic implications of the Syrian crisis work against Assad’s regime in the long run.
Asia Times Online :: Syria’s looming economic disaster 9/16/2013
Related: Insight: Syria’s economy goes underground as black market thrives | Reuters 9/5/2013
What we think of as “civilization” may not be all that fragile, as most places most of the time tolerate some low-level incidence of violence in crime, of urban decay, social pathology, the burdens of natural health-related issues across their populations, and outbreaks of flu and such, but political violence develops its own and often amplifying energies. While the military technician’s “low-intensity conflict” may be also continuous and survivable — as much seems to be true in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other hosts within the Islamic Small Wars as well as distinctly different conflict-laden cultures, e.g.,Mexico with the cartels, Colombia with the FARC — the same smoldering heat with its incidental fires may break out into more virulent and much amplified form.
The Assad regime did itself, much less its subject people, no favors when it launched jets against suspect redoubts where a more temperate leadership may have dispatched detectives and spies. In essence, it put itself on the path to burning down its own house.
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Environment
This drought — combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques — led to significant devastation. According to updated numbers, the drought displaced 1.5 million people within Syria.
Drought helped cause Syria’s war. Will climate change bring more like it? 9/10/2013
Pictures: Syrian Cultural Sites Damaged by Conflict 8/2012
List of heritage sites damaged during Syrian civil war – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aleppo: Scenes from a City of Ruins | TIME.com 4/26/2013
One should not overlook the pervasive influence that environment and landscape exerts on human mentality (see, for example, Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red), and while in our modern age we really should tackle this earth-human “earth process” challenge (visit, for example, Thomas Berry’s legacy foundation page), we may wonder at the fragility of our works in the path of war.
No less than with the culture, infrastructure, and habitations of the American south of 1860 by the end of 1865, the Syria of 2007 would seem about as “gone with the wind”.
The sovereignty of the regime has disappeared from the Kurdish quarter of the state; the state’s ability to monopolize violence and secure the lives of its citizens seems contested everywhere outside of Damascus; with the chemical weapons imbroglio, it’s ability to operate with near impunity within its own boundaries has been deeply compromised as it has dragged both Putin and Obama more deeply into its political workings.
One may leave the sovereign to be a sovereign even while asking “sovereign of what?”
With Syria at the moment, the answer to that may be “whatever’s left”.
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Health
Syria’s once sophisticated health system is “at breaking point” and parts of the country are completely cut off from any kind of medical service because of “deliberate and systematic attacks” on medical facilities and staff, senior doctors said on Monday.
Health care in Syria is ‘hell on earth,’ doctors say | Fox News 9/17/2013
Related: Open letter: let us treat patients in Syria : The Lancet 9/16/2013
Fox seems to have put up a conservative lead. That article goes on to note, among other similarly depressing factoids, that, “Of the 5,000 physicians in the city of Aleppo before the conflict started, only 36 remain . . . .”
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Refugees
More than 2 million Syrians are hosted in the region, placing unprecedented strain on communities, infrastructure and services in host countries.
There has been a massive escalation of arrivals in 2013. Over one million Syrian refugees have registered as refugees since the beginning of 2013.
Women and children make up three-quarters of the refugee population.
The vast majority of refugees are dependent on aid, arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Stories from Syrian Refugees, UNHCR, as viewed 9/18/2013.
Related: UNHCR – Syria Regional Response Plan (January – December 2013)
The combined burdens plus energies attending Syria’s displaced and refugee populations will change the world.
Or not.
Either way, the most vulnerable, hapless, youngest, peaceful, and innocent of humans involved in the war present the greater humanity, all of it, with the challenge of their survival, including their integration with what I’ll call the common humanity.
To date, with Somalia’s 1.7 million refugees, the trumped Palestinian numbers — in camps or somewhere between, all of those have been settled for years even if most unsatisfactorily across four states and two nominal territories — and yet some messes in Iraq and Pakistan, the greater humanity seems to have gotten used to keeping uprooted humans in circumscribed camps. However, the numbers involved in Syria’s political meltdown defy so pat, simple, or foreseen an approach to management and order.
With Syria’s refugees, not exactly friends of the Jews, Israel, “the west” — in part, it’s their own familiar claptrap that has both enabled and sustained the Assad dictatorship and invited to the archaic and decadent system the whirlwind now consuming it and themselves — the world will either harden its heart or open its doors (credit Sweden recently with responding to its part of the challenge with humanity).
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Related Reference
Russia blasts U.N. report on Syria chemical weapons attack as “politicized, preconceived and one-sided” – CBS News 9/18/2013
WFP aims get better food to Syrian refugees and more cash into host nations’ economies with voucher program – CBS News 9/18/2013
Detecting Looming Border Conflicts Using Satellites | United States Institute of Peace 9/10/2013
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