While the Trump Turns- the war in Aleppo continues

Although the political universe is focused on Trumpnian theatrics in the media hungry mogel's attempt to gain respect, the people of Syria continue to suffer, with little attention given to their horrific plight. Those continuing to bury heads in the wake of this humanitarian disaster are doomed to face the consequences of inaction.

By Steve Coll in The New Yorker

Syria - ASSAD’S WAR ON ALEPPO
An image of an injured child goes viral, but the fighting continues unabated.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has confounded many observers by holding on to power while his nation is deteriorating and citizens are Mediterranean Sea refugees.

He will be held accountable for war crimes but meanwhile his genocide continues.
On August 18th, Omran Daqneesh, who is five years old, survived an air strike on the apartment building where his family lived, in Aleppo, Syria. Rescue workers pulled him out of the rubble and took him to an ambulance. Mahmoud Raslan, of the Aleppo Media Center, who works in areas controlled by the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, photographed the child on video. 

His face was coated with blood and dirt; he sat staring silently. 

Within days, millions of viewers had seen Omran’s image on social media; the Times put it on the front page. The picture recalled Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photograph of a nine-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, taken as she fled naked and screaming from a napalm attack, or the images widely shared last year of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned off the Turkish coast, and whose body washed up on a beach. For adults to pause and reflect upon the costs of war, they sometimes require confrontation with a child’s suffering.

Omran Daqneesh lived, but his ten-year-old brother, Ali, died from the injuries he sustained. The tragedy stimulated a brief news cycle about the plight of Syrian civilians living in besieged areas. Aleppo, the nation’s largest city, has been in the grip of a fratricidal war since 2012. Assad’s regime controls districts in the west, while rebels are embedded in the east. The rebels include both jihadists formerly allied with Al Qaeda and commanders aligned with the Free Syrian Army, which has been supported sporadically by the Obama Administration. The rebels fire inaccurately into government areas with improvised mortars that they call “hell cannons.” The rounds include gas cylinders packed with explosives and metal shrapnel, designed to terrorize and maim. Assad’s forces, backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah militias, have a monopoly in the skies; their aircraft repeatedly bomb hospitals, markets, and residences. (The Islamic State holds territory nearby but is not organized in the city.)

It is hard to imagine a battle like the one in Aleppo getting worse, but it is. According to the United Nations, as many as two hundred and seventy-five thousand people may be trapped in rebel districts, because government forces have cut off the roads. Those people and hundreds of thousands of other residents have no electricity or running water. Despite ongoing international negotiations and periodic agreements to enact ceasefires and allow the provision of humanitarian aid, Assad’s government has slow-rolled or blocked aid deliveries, which often must be made by truck, on contested roads. In May, the Syria International Support Group, which includes Russia, China, the Arab League, European nations, and the U.S., endorsed another ceasefire and pledged to “ensure full and sustained humanitarian access in Syria.” This summer, that promise crumbled, like many before it.

The rebels and the civilians in Aleppo have endured, even though they are largely helpless against aerial assault. In addition to continued armed resistance, they have put together an extraordinary array of rescue workers, ambulance drivers, nurses, doctors, underground hospitals, electronic I.C.U.s, media producers, and low-power radio stations that warn listeners about air raids. The U.S., Europe, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nations, along with nongovernmental aid groups and the Syrian diaspora, have financed this infrastructure.

On August 14th, Al Jazeera released a film made by the Danish journalist Nagieb Khaja about the Syrian Civil Defense, a network of nearly three thousand first responders in rebel zones, who are known as “white helmets.” S.C.D. has pledged neutrality toward armed factions, but Assad’s forces and their allies have targeted it in “double tap” attacks, in which Syrian and Russian aircraft strike a rebel target, wait for rescue workers to turn up, and then bomb them as well. Khaja shot his film late last year in Aleppo, where he accompanied a squad of white helmets to the site of an attack. “People! Stop gathering in groups!” one of the rescuers shouts. “Spread out or they will shell!” Assad, through the conduct of his forces, has left little doubt that he is deliberately seeking to destroy medical and civil organizations in rebel areas in order to demoralize and depopulate those districts. (He may be succeeding. On Friday, people began to evacuate Darayya, near Damascus; the population has apparently capitulated, after four years of encirclement and assault.) 

According to Physicians for Human Rights, government forces and their Russian allies have carried out ninety per cent of the more than three hundred and fifty attacks on medical facilities during the past five years. A week ago, Syrian or Russian planes bombed an S.C.D. station in Aleppo.

Since 2013, it has been plain that President Obama believes it would be a mistake for the United States to intervene militarily, except to weaken evil ISIS; last week, in the latest iteration of the war’s shifting and opaque battlefield alliances, Turkish forces, with American support, invaded evil ISIS territory in northern Syria. 

After the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Libya, it’s easy to understand the President’s decision to focus on the immediate threat that evil ISIS poses. Yet the U.S. has engaged in areas where evil ISIS does not figure directly, such as Aleppo, where its policy emphasizes the provision of “nonlethal aid” to civilians and opposition forces. 

That aid helped to keep the rebels in the field, but it has not been enough to defeat Assad, or to deter his forces from employing unconscionable tactics, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that this caution has enabled the apparent war crimes of Assad and his allies. There is surely more that the Obama Administration can do to stop the regime’s attacks on hospitals and doctors, for example, by making the crisis a priority with allies and at the U.N. Security Council, as Physicians for Human Rights and others have urged.

Photographs shared on social media are not a sound basis for making foreign policy, of course. In this conflict, online hoaxes and fake images proliferate, and, even when a picture can be verified, as in the case of Omran Daqneesh, it can be difficult from a distance to peer behind a portrait of individual pain into the environment from which it arose. The image of Omran might be understood as simply a representation of Syrian suffering. It might also be seen as a depiction of the resilient depth of local opposition to Assad’s regime. We saw Omran’s face because rescue workers saved him, a videographer recorded his shock, and an Internet connection carried his image abroad. If Aleppo’s rebels and its civilian volunteers and inhabitants collapse under Assad’s brutal siege, history will remember more than a photograph. ♦  (Yes....and those who continue to ignore this humanitarian disaster are doomed to live with the consequences of their- ie "our" inaction.)

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.

This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “Images of War.”

Krauthammer "cul-de-sac"another fine journalism mess

Republican pundit Charles Krauthammer pontificates with authoritave, albeit wrong minded, flair. He reminds me of a political version of Oliver Hardy, of the popular Laurel & Hardy comedy team. 

Oliver Hardy of the team of "Laural and Hardy"

Like Hardy, who performed his comedy in hundreds of features and films, Krauthammer acts like he knows what he's doing in every situation, as though he's an all knowing expert. Similarly, Krauthammer typically has a talent for capturing the moment (just like Hardy!) but at the the end of his argument, his credibility fails and his bumbling reasoning is exposed.  

Krauthammer's short memory and his opinion about President Obama's immersion in the currently disintegrating Syrian crises is another example of "Hardy-onian" fumbling punditry.

It's convoluted thinking for Krauthammer to criticize President Obama's Syrian policy. He knows that Republicans have blocked every foriegn policy initiative, whereby a US led coalition could have helped to prevent the Syrian humanitarian and civil war crises.

In fact, Krauthammer's short term memory is also blocking the historic facts. His opinion, published in The Washington Post, completely overlooked how the Republicans stopped an intervention when the evil Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used poison gas, to kill his own people!  Although the US is a signer on the Geneva Protocol, outlawing the use of poison gas, the US Republican led Congress chose to ignore this obligation and, likewise, ignored Assad's evil and deadly use of the poison.  

Krauthammer selectively chose, instead, to remember his own "Hardy-onian" reinvention of the Syrian crisis. He writes, "Against the advice of his top civilian and military aides, Obama refused to intervene (in Syria). The widows and orphans (Obama) now so ostentatiously champions are the product of his coldhearted refusal to do anything that might sully his peacemaking image." This is a reinvention of history. Republicans are culpable in the Syrian disaster and humanitarian genocide.

Dear Mr. Krauthammer, I remember the development of the Syrian crisis differently. In fact, only God knows how many mothers lost their children during Assad's use of poison gas on his people, while the Republican congress ignored the Geneva Protocol.

Moreover, Krauthammer contributes to the unfounded fear about innocent refugees who are not terrorists. He writes, "Obama charged the Republicans with cowardice, afraid to grant admittance to '3-year-old orphans'. He gave zero credit to the very real concern of governors and other officials that terrorists could be embedded amid the refugees. This is no theoretical proposition. At least one of the Paris attackers came to France by way of Greece."  
Oh paaaleeze Mr. Krauthammer! 

As a journalist, you have an ethical obligation to report the news, rather than to create it. There's no evidence that any of the attackers in France were Syrian refugees. Rather, the killers were terrorists who somehow avoided international surveillance. 

Instead, Krauthammer should write (in Maine Writer prose), "President Obama gets credit for reminding Americans about how difficult it is for any refugees to enter the US, and this diligence is essential to protect Americans from the risk of ISIS "look alike" attacks". 

Fueling refugee mania, when there's no evidence to support your fear mongerng is buzzing on yellow journalism.

Unfortunately, Krauthammer writes his salient opinion point at the very end of his article, assuming the reader can endure his narrative long enough to read it.  He writes, "...Trump-like anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, now anti-Muslim, anti-Arab rhetoric — and don’t forget those cunning Chinese stealing our jobs and ruthless Mexicans raping our women — will not play well in a general election. Politically, it will be fatal. John Kasich has forcefully denounced this slide into the swamp. Where are the others?"

Advising Charles Krauthammer about journalism is like telling Oliver Hardy he isn't really funny. But, in my opinion, Krauthammer should remember journalism 101, ie to begin his essays with the point to be made in the narrative. 

Krauthammer's essay, "The Syrian immigration cul-de-sac", is "another fine mess" he can't explain with accuracy.

(And, if you don't mind my asking.....how did the metaphor "cul-de-sac" fit with your opinion, anyway?)

Syria - the population is living in exhile

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a puppet leader of a nation where millions of his own citizens are living in exhile!

During Syria's now five year old tragic civil war, a huge number of the victims are Syrians in exile, living in refugee camps!

In a Washington Post opinion article, Valerie Amos writes to draw attention to this humanitarian crises.

Valerie Amos is U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.
Writes:

As I prepare to leave the United Nations at the end of May, I am haunted by the crisis that has defined my tenure: the breathtakingly savage war in Syria, now in its fifth year.

At last month’s pledging conference in Kuwait, many countries promised millions of dollars for aid to Syrians in need. 

We are grateful for these funds, which mean humanitarian agencies can continue to deliver life-saving food, water, shelter and health care. But I still cannot believe that the world has looked on as this crisis and its devastating human consequences have unfolded. 

More than 220,000 people have been killed and about 8 million displaced.

In recent weeks, more than 100,000 people have been on the move in Idliband surrounding parts of northwestern Syria, attempting to escape the violence while schools, hospitals and shops close around them. In theYarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, 18,000 Palestinian refugees are trapped by fighting.

It is ordinary Syrians who are suffering. They have been bombed out of their homes, tortured, abused and denied food, water and health care. Families have been torn apart. Communities have been destroyed. I have visited Syria seven times and have talked to Syrian refugees on numerous trips to Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. During every visit I was asked the same thing: Why has the world abandoned us? Why does nobody care?


These questions were not directed at the humanitarian community, but at our leaders, perhaps particularly at the permanent members of the Security Council. People spoke of how narrow national interests are overriding broader global responsibilities, despite the efforts of the U.N. secretary general’s three special envoys to chart a way out of the crisis. Our demands to the Syrian government — which claims that its priority is the protection of its people — to stop targeting civilians and discontinue the use of so-called “barrel bombs” have fallen on deaf ears.

So what has gone wrong, and what more can be done?

What strikes me every day is our inability to protect people — not just in Syria but in other countries. A total of 193 governments of the United Nations have signed on to international conventions and laws aimed at protecting basic human rights. Even war has rules. But the laws and standards we have to protect people in conflict are not being respected.

Modern wars are less likely to involve national armed forces fighting each other than those in the past. They often occur between state forces and nonstate armed groups with complex and shifting allegiances.

This poses challenges for international humanitarian and human rights laws. Nonstate actors, armed groups, terrorist groups and sometimes governments, under the guise of fighting terrorism, often show disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law and contempt for human life. They act with impunity.

In Syria, the government and the armed and terrorist groups have prevented food and medical supplies from reaching people in desperate need. They have attacked residential areas, schools and hospitals. They have denied water and electricity to people in areas not under their control — clear infringements of international humanitarian and human rights law.

This has had a devastating impact on civilians. It also has undermined the credibility of the United Nations, despite the heroic efforts of humanitarian workers risking their lives to help the most vulnerable.


The Security Council works best when there is agreement on the steps needed to deal with a specific issue. We saw this in the successful, unified approach to tackling the removal of chemical weapons from Syria — a goal many thought was impossible.

There have been three Security Council resolutions on humanitarian access and protection of civilians in Syria, but here we cannot claim significant progress. Why not? Because in a war zone, without incentives to de-escalate violence and without agreement on the mechanisms needed to protect civilians — the establishment of no-fly zones and safe areas, for example — civilians will continue to be targeted.

It is an extremely difficult problem, but we cannot allow ourselves to see it as impossible to solve, because it is not. To make progress, we must focus the attention of member states and use the U.N.’s extensive experience and expertise, including public and private diplomacy, to reach agreement on a political transition in Syria and on mechanisms to de-escalate violence. Countries funding terrorist organizations need to be called to account. Countries with influence need to use it in a coordinated and structured way.

Above all, protecting basic human rights must be at the heart of the agenda. We need to break down the elements and responsibilities under international humanitarian and human rights laws and seek consensus on priority actions — for example, protecting the safety and security of health facilities and workers, ending the recruitment of child soldiers, and protecting women and girls. And we must establish practical mechanisms to enforce these laws.

Breaking the political impasse will require a shift in the calculus — to put the needs of ordinary people at the heart of decision-making.

Countries look to the United Nations to exercise moral authority. Time after time, they are disappointed. They want an international system that is just, promotes equality, champions the vulnerable and oppressed, protects human rights and holds its members to account. In the modern world, with the complexity of the challenges facing us, this is becoming harder and harder. But it is possible. It is a challenge, but one that, with determination and commitment, we can overcome.

Julie's note - there will come a time when these millions of desperate Syrian refugees will expect and deserve reparations for their displacement. President Assad, like all despot before him, won't live forever.  It seems to me, he's on a trajectory to be the figure head leader of a population in exhile.