Syria’s Murky Road is a Global Threat
March 28, 2015
‘Mothers giving birth to a little son
Crying in the rain of falling bombs
Father he is young but deep and wise
You see the fighter inside his eyes
Hold me cover my sight
This is no paradise
Don’t show me the
Evil sides of the world.’
-From How Many Hours, Michael Learns to Rock
When a man-made chaos is tolerated, it will continue to thrive yielding massive destruction for humanity. The failure to end this disaster may mark the beginning of a country’s human race’s annihilation offering chances for other entities with dark motives to penetrate and join the bloody race in ensuring the fusion of their globally unsanctioned ideologies. This is happening in Syria- a global warning! Syria today has reached a dooming stage one couldn’t ever imagine! It is a living example for the world to know that unity is a powerful component in restoring peace.
In a country encountering coldblooded civil war, millions of Syrian civilians feel that the world has forgotten them. According to Antonio Guterres, High Commissioner for United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Syrian war is the biggest humanitarian test of today that needs a political commitment by countries with economic stability. A dilemma created by Syrian government being the most dangerous place for children today for displacing over 6 million people of which more than 3 million are children with additional estimate of over 10 million people displaced in their country. Entities with humanitarian visions then are encouraged to join the cause.
Formerly, Angelina Jolie’s charitable services to the UNHCR revealed in her touching film on Syrian Refugees in Lebanon that the Syrian children is a generation traumatized by violence and because of these unimaginable chaos, they learn to grow before their time in varied behavior. They are the traumatized children of war whose lives in the future will be neither in peril nor become liabilities if ignored today.
How did it happen? The clash started primarily as a civil uprising evolving from a minor protest as early as January of 2011 which eventually spread around the whole country. A movement inspired by North African and Middle Eastern protest movements known as the Arab Spring against corruption and human rights violations of which other countries were liberated to these government atrocities. Unfortunately, its impact to this country was worse than what was expected to be till today. People die every day. For those left behind in the country, people die of hunger trapped between warring parties. Millions drift in other countries with shattered dreams according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights published in the Time Magazine.
On January 2011, the Syrian opposition protesters demanded democratic and economic reforms to the present government. In response to the citizens’ protest, massive arrest, torture of prisoners, police and military brutality and censorship of events surfaced.
Sources pointed out that by May 2011, President Assad released hundreds of political prisoners of whom some played significant roles in the armed opposition. The siege continued to soar from the Southern City of Darua. Syrian army was deployed to stop the uprising and these soldiers fired on demonstrators across the country. Assad government ordered command on military operations against towns and cities which involved the use of tanks, infantry, and carrier artillery which cause the large –scale of civilian deaths and other forms of destructions. In the same year, a group of defecting security officers, soldiers and civilian volunteers formed a group called Free Syrian Army (FSA) against the secret police and intelligence agents who executed soldiers when they refused to shoot civilians. This became an umbrella group that represented the main opposition army seeking to topple President Bashar Al Assad from power. This military insurgency took place for several months which grew its size to 20,000 members by December 2011 and reached almost 40,000 members turning out to be Syria’s National Council for anti-government group by June 2012 .Within this date , the United Nation (UN) officially declared Syria under the state of civil war. Both parties remain at war capturing strongholds from one province to another as well as the cities.
Sources revealed that by 2013, Hezbollah entered the war in support of the Syrian Army. This Islamic militant group was conceived by Muslim clerics and financed by Iran following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and was primarily formed to offer resistance to the Israeli occupation. Its leaders were followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, and its forces were trained and organized by a commission of 1,500 Iranian revolutionary guards. Military supports for the Assad government arrived from Iran and Russia while Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the USA with the efforts of other Western nations transfer weapons to the rebels that include the Sunni, Jihadists and the Sunni militant group.
It was also this year when the Syrian government controls about 30-40 per cent of the territory and 60 percent of its population. To add the nightmares of war, tens of thousands of protesters, students, liberal activists, human rights advocates were imprisoned. Reports claimed that there are widespread tortures and terrors in the state prisons. Both opposition and government were accused of these severe human rights violations.
Sources reported that Palestinian Yarmouk Camp holds an estimate of over 20,000 residents who are facing death by starvation. The UN and the Amnesty International‘s (AI) probes in Syria identified that between the war from 2012 to 2013, majority of the abuses were committed by the Syrian government.
The Syrian revolutionary group was inspired by the Arab Spring Revolutionary Group that toppled leaders of neighboring Arab countries. The Arab Spring Movement is powerfully influential ground-breaking rebellion which other Arab opposition groups patterned or mirrored as an instrument of change. In December 2010, dispute started in Tunisia then moving to Egypt. Libya had its share of the civil war leading to the untimely death of the former president Muammar Khadafi under the hands of the country’s civilian guerillas. Other Arab countries also faced protests that prompted the countries’ governments to negotiate forms of concessions and governmental reforms to appease the rebels.
Meanwhile, a deep-rooted dark past linking to the present history informs us that Hafe Al Assad; a former Defense Minister ignited a coup for his power’s restoration in 1970. His death in 2000 put his son, Bashar Al Assad as a president. It is a public knowledge that both father and son used terror and force to maintain their rules. The elder Assad ceased a rebellion in 1982 in Hama City killing at least 10,000 people responsible for the anti-government movement. Those were haunting pasts which revolutionary forces wanted to additionally end.
The rebellion remains to spew its wraths in Syria. Could this be a case of multi-divided forces, interests and ideology that cause the war’s severing condition? Does the situation of the country justify the UN’s report in 2012 when it described the civil war as “overtly sectarian in nature? Could this be justified by the idea of the UN that the uprising is asymmetrical between Alawite government forces, militias and other Shia groups fighting largely against Sunni-dominated rebel groups? It may have justified but does not mean an end to the conflicts. Syria as a country under siege has proven its weakness. It allowed the intervention of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ( ISIS) with a strong dream in building a caliphate believe to be using a reverse side of the Islamic faith, including Iraq to widen its territories. Today, we hear breaking news of massive executions of civilians and foreigners in Syria and Iraq. ISIS emerges with the purpose of disseminating its visions throughout the world with all the strategies they could employ disregarding the value of human lives being sacrificed.
While the road to Syrian tranquility stands still, Syrian dreams die while the civil war remains. And while its people are lost, Iraq’s people affected by this constant conflicts face similar fate. Countries in proximity to these two nations have the great probabilities to suffer the unending clashes. It will also be recalled that since the beginning of ISIS’s operation, many citizens around the world have been indoctrinated to join the group through the propaganda thriving around from the cyberspace.
The saga of its origin will continue to be depicted in the real lives of many neighboring countries till all are caught under genocidal apocalypse if these tragedies persist. The dark fate of one nation in the planet is a major concern for all despite the absence of countries’ proximity from one another. It is then crucial that we be vigilant to its suave tactical moves to avoid its fusion . marvinwacnaglidawan@gmail.com
