New normal

The four infants didn’t die from the bomb blast that ripped apart the medical facility into which they had entered this world. The blast destroyed the oxygen supply keeping them alive in their incubators. All four died, gasping for breath. Murdered by their own government. It is an increasingly common story in Syria.

Over the past month, 42 medical facilities including 15 hospitals, have been attacked in Aleppo. On average, a medical facility is hit by government bombs every 17 hours in this city of 300,000. Despite the terrible risks, doctors, nurses, orderlies and maintenance staff go to work every day.

They know they must help. They don’t understand why the rest of the world won’t.

Fifteen of the last 35 doctors in the eastern part of Aleppo wrote to Barack Obama a week ago pleading for his country to intervene to stop the bombardment of hospitals.

“We do not need to tell you that the systematic targeting of hospitals by the Syrian regime and Russian warplanes is a war crime,” wrote the doctors in a joint letter. “We do not need to tell you that they are committing atrocities in Aleppo.”

Some refused to sign the letter. They have given up hope that the West will help them.

Every day, government jets relentlessly pound rebel-held areas of the city. They do so unchecked by an international community fixated on the extraordinary brutality of ISIS. Meanwhile, the mundane and systematic slaughter of its citizens by the Syrian government goes on with little notice or outrage.

According to the New York Times, 233 civilians have been killed in Aleppo over the past two weeks—many of them women and children.

Yet we refuse to intervene.

We tell ourselves stories to ease our guilt for our inability to act. The rebels are bad people too. This is a religious and cultural struggle in which we don’t belong, or might make worse. It’s not our fight, best we mind our own business.

This story is much simpler, much more ordinary. Bashar al-Assad is a brutal and bloodsoaked dictator desperately clinging to power by murdering his people by the hundreds of thousands.

Last week, Assad’s planes dropped barrel bombs filled with chlorine gas into rebel-held territory, spreading death and violence indiscriminately into the vulnerable lungs of children and the elderly.

When the reports are verified, it will be documented as a war crime—another of a long list of atrocities ignored by the West. The American government made it clear in 2013 it won’t stop Assad from using chemical weapons on his own people.

Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with manufactured spectacle: the Olympics, a presidential race/reality television series and a shirtless Prime Minister on vacation.

In our absence, thugs in Moscow, Tehran and, increasingly, Istanbul see an opportunity to grow their own influence both at home and in the region. If your ambition, say, was to cleave off a large portion of the Ukraine for Mother Russia, is there a better moment than right now?

The West has mostly abandoned the Syrian people and much of the rest of the world. We’re either too timid or narcissistic to see the risk we bring upon ourselves.

We wring our hands about terrorist attacks, yet fail to see the connection between our own indifference and the violence brought to our doorstep.

But history suggests we won’t be permitted to ignore it forever. Thugs grow bolder. People become more desperate. Conflict grows.

Inevitably, we may be compelled to intervene. But what will that conflagration look like? What will we unleash then?

Meanwhile, Syrian government jets are flying out of Damascus this morning instructed to double tap hospitals and clinics in Aleppo. This means they drop half their bombardments on the first pass. When emergency workers and others arrive to help—bombers swing past a second time to unload the remainder of their deadly payload.

If not now, when? At the very least, the West, the international community or the U.S. alone, must define a new red line—an atrocity too great, too vile, too barbaric. How much death and destruction will we tolerate? How long can we continue to look away?

rick@wellingtontimes.ca