I'm Right Again Dot Com

                             A new commentary every Wednesday — Aug 24, 2016


 

ALEPPO, SYRIA: The Worst Place in the World Today

    For Russians, it will always be during the 900 days during Word War two in St. Petersburg, known during the Communist era as "Leningrad." The German army had the city surrounded and pounded it mercilessly with artillery. It is estimated that roughly 650,000 Russians died from the shelling, starvation and the cold.

    In a terrible irony, the Russian military is doing the same to the population of one of the oldest cities in the world—continuously inhabited in the north of Syria for some 6,000 years, by aiding the Monster Assad in bombing and gassing his own people. How can Comrade Putin justify this?

    Aleppo once was home to an estimated 2.5-million people, prior to the Arab uprising in the Spring of 2012. It is difficult to research the number of civilians killed, but according to the Guardian, a reliable British publication, some 14,000 had been killed a year ago.  At least 25,000 had been injured. There may be no way of counting the displaced—a Diaspora of hundreds of thousands, stretching all the way through Europe to England—even to the USA. 

    Thanks to the scores of incredibly dedicated journalists, we are all witnesses to this mass atrocity; this crime against humanity, personified most recently by  the bloodied little Omran, the boy dug from the remains of his shattered home and placed in one of the few ambulances operating in 160 square miles of nothing but rubble. Any person who in any sense aware of the desperate circumstances, in which thousands of Syrians are trapped, has to know that many more Syrians will die from shelling: from starvation and the lack of clean drinking water, medicines and doctors, every day this situation is allowed to exist.

    How many are there at risk of extermination? God only knows. One wants to turn away when heroic volunteer doctors and victims plead for help on television.  (This broke since I first composed it on Monday: NBC News reported that upwards of 75,000 children are at risk in Aleppo today.)  

    We learned over the weekend from New York Times Journalists on the scene in that Russian Sukhoi SU-34 long distance bombers have been using air bases  in Iran to make their air strikes, reportedly as many as 500 in a day. A late dispatch supposedly from Tehran has allegedly caused a cessation of this cooperative effort due to Iran insisting that the arrangement be kept secret. "Instead," Iran is alleged to have accused the Russian government of "Betraying a Trust."

    Today, (8/23), I read in the New York Times that the supposed working relationship between US and Russian military is in disarray, due in part to Russian warships, now firing missiles into the area held by Anti-Assad-Rebels.

    What must it take to bring the rest of the World to the aid of the people being slaughtered in Syria? 
 

      -Phil Richardson, Observer of the human condition and storyteller. "He goes doddering on into his old age, making a public nuisance of himself." - Joseph L. Mencken

  k7os@comcast.net


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