"I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War . . . [T]hey were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know, you never wrote a story with a villain in it.' I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
It's an education reading the press clippings from Syria these days, but when has it not been? Has the headline "Syrian conflict escalates" been in type since Saladin was holding off the Crusaders? Or maybe since the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on a particular and well-known road therein? Read all about the Crusades in the books, and about that conversion in The Book.
A caller brought our attention to the Syrian conflict again. (When will the war ever stop? Or can it?) And the education can be all about euphemism and circumlocution. When will we be able to call murder murder, slaughter slaughter and war crimes war crimes?
Gentle Reader may remember back a year or more ago when the people of Aleppo, Syria, began to leave their city by the hundreds of thousands. Where did many of them go? According to dispatches, they left for the northwest province of Idlib, Syria. In short, they went west, young man.
Now they are trapped there, in what the government calls a De-Escalation Zone.
If de-escalating means a merciless bombing campaign by the Syrian government on a tent city full of civilians, then yes, it's a De-Escalation Zone. Just as slaughterhouses are safe havens.
Folks around the world, and Americans in particular, have a lot on their plates these days. On these shores, we have a government that's close to shutting down every month, immigration woes, blizzards in the South and basketball to worry about. But, for the record, here's what's going on in Syria:
According to human-rights groups, on frequent occasions in Idlib province, folks have to abandon their tent cities when the bombings begin, as Syria's government--along with its Russian and Iranian allies--concentrate fire on pockets of rebels. In the Idlib area alone, there may be what the UN euphemistically calls one million Internally Displaced People. And to make it even more easy to swallow, the folks writing the reports downshift into acronyms, calling these Internally Displaced People IDPs, so as to not have to refer to actual "people" more than once.
According to CNN, these attacks "come just weeks before Moscow-sponsored peace talks are set to take place." Sure, if you people will just stop running and hiding from the Syrian planes and helicopters, the Russian-backed regime will stop killing you. Eventually.
"What we are looking at right now is basically a ticking bomb that might explode at any moment if the regime continues advancing in Idlib," said Haid Haid, a research fellow at Kings College in London. "There's no way to leave that area. There's no way that many of them can move to regime-controlled areas. So, what we are looking at here is a big number of people who are waiting to be slaughtered if no action is taken."
The Guardian reported last week that the Bashar al-Assad regime has picked up a new habit in Idlib, something right out of The Hunger Games: The locals call it a "double-tap." That's when the regime's planes bomb an area, wait a few minutes for emergency personnel to arrive, then bomb the place again, sending ambulances and medics flying. Al Jazeera reports that some workers were treated for lung problems because of a suspected chlorine gas attack.
What's being done?
Peace talks are in the works.
Brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran.
The same sort of tender people who came up with the De-Escalation Zones.
While Russia, Turkey, Iran and the Assad regime are killing civilians, putting children out into the wet and cold winter, and generally divvying up parts of the Middle East, what does the world do?
The United Nations "expressed alarm" at the situation. One of its agencies asked for a pause in the fighting so it could get food in and wounded out.
This past week, a more reliable voice than the United Nations--the Trump administration--was heard from: Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, said one day, one day, elections will come to Syria, and the Assad family will be gone. Proving that being more reliable than the UN isn't saying much.
"Responsible change," Secretary Tillerson said, "may not come as immediately as some hope for, but rather through an incremental process of constitutional reform and UN-supervised elections. But that change will come."
The question is, by the time incremental and UN-supervised change comes to Idlib, will anyone there still be alive to care?
Editorial on 01/21/2018