Assad is starving Palestinians to death in a Syrian camp, and nobody cares
Published : 10-07-2014
t’s been three years since the civil war broke out in Syria, and there is no end in sight. More than 120,000 people have been killed so far. Two-and-a-half million Syrians are refugees. The damage to the country’s infrastructure is estimated at $3 billion On the ground, a fragile equilibrium holds between the regime and its opponents. President Bashar Assad’s army manages limited gains in key regions, like the coastal area near Tartus and Latakia, and in major cities like Aleppo and Damascus. But the regime is far from defeating the rebels, and has, to some extent, come to terms with rebel control over certain areas, like the Kurdish region in northeastern Syria.
Assad’s opponents, for their part, continue to show weakness and fractiousness, as a motley assortment of groups — some radical Islamists, others secular — fight the regime and fight each other. The Syrian army today numbers close to 230,000 men. Facing them are 120,000 rebels, two-thirds of whom are considered Islamists — 10 percent are affiliated with al-Qaeda — and they’re all killing each other.It is interesting to recall how this war started, with an incident so minor that no one would have paid attention to it if it happened today. A group of kids in the city of Daraa, near the border with Jordan, daubed some anti-Assad graffiti. Syrian policemen arrested the children, beat them, and took them to jail. The city’s residents demonstrated against the arrests, and from that point onward, the bodies began to pile up.This week, too, and last week, and the week before that, shocking pictures came out of Syria, and it seems that everyone, even Syrians, has grown used to them. The killing of women, children, and the elderly has become a routine occurrence, so commonplace that the average news viewer in Israel and across the entire Middle East is no longer affected by it. Another village destroyed by aerial bombing, more refugees fleeing for their lives, more bodies strewn across the streets.One of the recent atrocities took place in midweek in the Jarabulus area, near a place called a-Shiyuh. Members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliate, killed 22 people, children among them, and threw their bodies into the street to instill fear in the population. Some of the bodies were tossed into the Euphrates River. The victims were not supporters of the regime, rather of the Free Syrian Army, the military outfit representing the moderate opposition factions.And Assad’s army continues to do what it does: bombings from the air using explosive barrels on opposition neighborhoods, or surface-to-surface missiles, in addition to massacres by armed groups that are not part of the regular army. Nevertheless, it was hard not to be moved this week by a report published by Amnesty International on the situation in Yarmouk near Damascus. Until the start of the civil war, Yarmouk was the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Close to 150,000 people lived there in crowded conditions. But since the summer, the regime has carried out a cruel siege on the camp’s residents after Hamas members there took an active part in fighting the Syrian army. Now there are only 20,000 residents left in the camp.The siege arouses no international indignation, in stark contrast to reactions to the nonexistent siege around the Gaza Strip. Occasionally, reports are published on what happens in the camp, and still, the international community has allowed Assad to carry on with one of his most brutal campaigns against the opposition.According to Amnesty International, the Assad regime is simply starving the camp to death. The humanitarian aid that reaches the camp is negligible, and 200 residents have died, 128 of them from hunger, according to Amnesty.Eighteen were children and babies.According to Philip Louter, director of the Middle East and North Africa region at Amnesty, “Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk.”The regime, Amnesty said, prevented food and military supplies from reaching the camp, arrested and tortured medical staff there, bombed schools and hospitals, caused severe malnutrition (60% of the camp is malnourished), and more.And the world is silent. Even those in Israel who raise a clamor over a few hours’ delay in the delivery of a sack of rice to Gaza ignore the atrocity. As long as it’s Arabs killing Arabs, who cares?
t’s been three years since the civil war broke out in Syria, and there is no end in sight. More than 120,000 people have been killed so far. Two-and-a-half million Syrians are refugees. The damage to the country’s infrastructure is estimated at $3 billion On the ground, a fragile equilibrium holds between the regime and its opponents. President Bashar Assad’s army manages limited gains in key regions, like the coastal area near Tartus and Latakia, and in major cities like Aleppo and Damascus. But the regime is far from defeating the rebels, and has, to some extent, come to terms with rebel control over certain areas, like the Kurdish region in northeastern Syria.
Assad’s opponents, for their part, continue to show weakness and fractiousness, as a motley assortment of groups — some radical Islamists, others secular — fight the regime and fight each other. The Syrian army today numbers close to 230,000 men. Facing them are 120,000 rebels, two-thirds of whom are considered Islamists — 10 percent are affiliated with al-Qaeda — and they’re all killing each other.It is interesting to recall how this war started, with an incident so minor that no one would have paid attention to it if it happened today. A group of kids in the city of Daraa, near the border with Jordan, daubed some anti-Assad graffiti. Syrian policemen arrested the children, beat them, and took them to jail. The city’s residents demonstrated against the arrests, and from that point onward, the bodies began to pile up.This week, too, and last week, and the week before that, shocking pictures came out of Syria, and it seems that everyone, even Syrians, has grown used to them. The killing of women, children, and the elderly has become a routine occurrence, so commonplace that the average news viewer in Israel and across the entire Middle East is no longer affected by it. Another village destroyed by aerial bombing, more refugees fleeing for their lives, more bodies strewn across the streets.One of the recent atrocities took place in midweek in the Jarabulus area, near a place called a-Shiyuh. Members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliate, killed 22 people, children among them, and threw their bodies into the street to instill fear in the population. Some of the bodies were tossed into the Euphrates River. The victims were not supporters of the regime, rather of the Free Syrian Army, the military outfit representing the moderate opposition factions.And Assad’s army continues to do what it does: bombings from the air using explosive barrels on opposition neighborhoods, or surface-to-surface missiles, in addition to massacres by armed groups that are not part of the regular army. Nevertheless, it was hard not to be moved this week by a report published by Amnesty International on the situation in Yarmouk near Damascus. Until the start of the civil war, Yarmouk was the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Close to 150,000 people lived there in crowded conditions. But since the summer, the regime has carried out a cruel siege on the camp’s residents after Hamas members there took an active part in fighting the Syrian army. Now there are only 20,000 residents left in the camp.The siege arouses no international indignation, in stark contrast to reactions to the nonexistent siege around the Gaza Strip. Occasionally, reports are published on what happens in the camp, and still, the international community has allowed Assad to carry on with one of his most brutal campaigns against the opposition.According to Amnesty International, the Assad regime is simply starving the camp to death. The humanitarian aid that reaches the camp is negligible, and 200 residents have died, 128 of them from hunger, according to Amnesty.Eighteen were children and babies.According to Philip Louter, director of the Middle East and North Africa region at Amnesty, “Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk.”The regime, Amnesty said, prevented food and military supplies from reaching the camp, arrested and tortured medical staff there, bombed schools and hospitals, caused severe malnutrition (60% of the camp is malnourished), and more.And the world is silent. Even those in Israel who raise a clamor over a few hours’ delay in the delivery of a sack of rice to Gaza ignore the atrocity. As long as it’s Arabs killing Arabs, who cares?
