[September 26, 2016] War! Any armed conflict is a vicious, cruel affair and is neither fair nor clean, nor simple. Consequently, it’s difficult to report on its impact. Civil wars in particular are brutish and nasty because many fighters are not professionals and they lack good leadership, but also because civilians are more likely to be killed and injured. There should be no surprise that reporting on the affects of the civil war in Syria, shows a willful blindness by Western media, politicians, and U.N. officials who report on it.
What we do know is that Syrian government troops have been making advances lately, in part, due to Russian and Iranian help to Syria, as well as U.S. strikes on ISIS fighters. Alliances in the war are complex and changing, making it difficult for reporting purposes but also hard for intelligence to analyze the data coming from the field. However, everything seems to suggest that anti-Syrian forces (mostly ISIS) are slowly being pushed back and defeated in places.
Western media, politicians, and U.N. officials are, unsurprisingly, shocked at the destruction the civil war has wrought upon that country’s civilian population and destruction to its infrastructure. In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo (yep, the same one U.S. presidential hopeful Libertarian Gary Johnson didn’t know about), much of the city is without water and its receiving what is described as the “heaviest air bombardment” of the war.1
U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon issued a statement saying the use of “indiscriminate” weapons in densely populated areas “may amount to war crimes.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said what was happening in Aleppo was “beyond the pale.” The Turkey-based Syrian National Coalition called the campaign a “crazy crime led by the Assad regime and Russian occupation.” These comments show a complete break with reality when it comes to war.
Our best information to date estimates 300,000 killed and half of the Syrian population has been driven from their homes. To compare, in the U.S. Civil War, it is estimated that over 620,000 were killed and 500,000 killed in the Spanish Civil War. The history of civil wars provides us with a long list of those conflicts; many lost to record (see List of civil wars at Wikipedia, link here).
All these wars have something in common; they were brutal, nasty, but rarely short. When Hanaa Singer of the agency UNICEF said “Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of water-borne diseases,”1 not only does she state the obvious, but underscores the lack of understanding of the cruelty and levels of violence civil wars are prone to bring upon citizens of that country.
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