Shahadat Rahman Professor Matyakubova English 21003 27 November, 2017 Journal Entry 9
The
BBC News article “Syria: Russian Air Strikes ‘Kill Dozens of Civilians’”
provides insight into the state of the war-ridden country, Syria. The article
details the 53 deaths in the most recent Russian airstrikes in the Syrian
village of Al-Shafah; it details merely a symptom of a much larger problem. The
Syrian civil war began in 2011 as a result of the opposition again the Bashar
al-Assad regime. Since the beginning of the civil war the government has
employed chemical weapons (considered to be a war crime) and slaughtered
hundreds of thousands in the name of ending terrorism. Yet instead of killing
the terrorists, the Assad regime merely became the terrorists.
The number of deaths in Syria goes beyond the scope of
fighting terrorism. The vast majority of people killed are not rebels or
terrorists, they are ordinary civilians — many of them are even children. In
fact, last year a young Syrian boy named Omran Daqneesh captured the world’s
attention when images of his blood-covered face spread across the internet
after he was caught in one of the airstrikes. The boy came to symbolize the
plight of civilians in eastern Aleppo and motivated several world leaders and
ordinary citizens to act. Yet dispute being called out by the rest of the
world, the Assad regime refuses to stop the bombings. Yet in no way is this a
just war. The justification is not adequate when the majority of the people who
end up dead are innocents, many of them children. There is no justification for
a war when an entire city is destroyed for the sake of killing only a few
targets. There is no justification for a war that leaves thousands displaced
from their homes, forced to move to seek refuge in new countries or test their
luck in their own country— a country which actively seeks their destruction.
The war in Syria needs to end: the deaths mentioned in the article are merely presented
as a statistic, but each one of those people had families and lives. It is easy
to forget that when these acts become so common and in such high volume.
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