By reporting on a civil war, a sectarian war, and a proxy war, by focusing on the extremist groups taking advantage of the breakdown of the state and international indifference while ignoring the links between the Assad regime and these groups, by focusing on the concerns of minority communities in the country and the removal of chemical weapons, and by providing continuous coverage of a political process in Geneva that is unlikely to produce serious results, the reality of what is taking place in Syria, namely the genocide that is being perpetrated against the majority Sunni Arab population is being hidden in plain sight: the war is visible, the genocide is not. The very word is seldom used even as stories of concentration camps and starvation campaigns break out.
Tag: Activists
Notes on Current Developments in Syria: January 13, 2014
For long activists have contended that the one true concept that captures the essence of what’s really happening in Syria is: Genocide. They referred to regime prisons as concentration camps dedicated to the liquidation of prisoners, most of who civilians, relatives of activists and rebels, and the peaceful pro-democracy activists themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom hail from an Arab Sunni background. Now, this horrific image currently making round on social media sites seem to capture this truth: the numbers on the rotten cadavers, denote the security branch responsible for this massacre. In this case, it’s the infamous Section 215 of the military intelligence apparatus. The emaciated bodies of the dead underscore the living conditions prevailing in the camps. The picture was reportedly smuggled out by a defector, and while its authenticity is yet to be confirmed, it’s consistent with the myriad eyewitness accounts given to Human Rights Watch, among other organizations.
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The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 