Deprivation

"Syrian women do not breast feed. They are having problems shifting to this procedure. Some don't have the food they need to produce high quality milk. Others are too frightened by the war. As a result, without clean formula, the babies will soon die."
Dr. Badr Salibi, Syrian internist

In subscribing to the school of those who spurn breast feeding over the perceived advantages of bottle-feeding, Syrian woman, believing they have joined the vanguard of female entitlements to more modern, advanced techniques in baby-raising, have managed to demonstrate just how backward a society theirs is.

Just as in Africa where African mothers turn aside from breast feeding and clamour for baby formula in emulation of what they believe to be the more advantaged of their gender living in first-world countries, the women of Syria succumbed to the same delusionary conceit. Likely in normal times, however, they did not, as did African women, water down the formula leaving little nutrition for the feeding babies, as a cost-saving device.

And now there is scant opportunity in besieged towns and cities to procure that suddenly-valuable baby formula and the concerns have mounted that their babies will suffer. The state, in fact, does supply baby formula, but it does so in areas where Shia Muslims live, who support the regime. Loyalty equals the advantages of opportunity, entitlement and longevity.

Why would the regime, bother supplying the fount of life for babies to areas disloyal to it, after all? Sunni babies haven't the entitlements of Shia babies.

And that, presumably, is where humanitarian agencies come to the rescue. Except that in so many of those desperately unserviced areas it is too dangerous for western humanitarian agencies to venture, to do their work on behalf of the needy. On the other hand, it is not just baby formula that is in short supply, but cooking oil and basic foods.

In some instances it is not shortages, but prices beyond which most people who have been unemployed as a result of the general upheaval, can possibly afford. People who somehow managed to keep themselves going, through the conflicts, and through the shortages of fuel, food, medicines, find themselves without purchase power now.

And some who have borrowed, can no longer do so. So, one might ask, who are those who are charging inflated prices to people suddenly become indigent through no fault of their own other than their religious sect inheritance? Obviously, people of the same persuasion, but in an advantaged position, for human cupidity knows no bounds.

In Aleppo, as elsewhere, ordinary civic services have long, long since been unavailable. Mountains of stinking, mouldering garbage sit uncollected, a source for infection and disease. Running water, electricity, no longer available in rebel-held territories. Where there are ample basic foods available in the markets, there is poverty to match and food outpriced for the consumption of the poor.

"We have reduced our food purchases and live on sandwiches", says one man.

And then there are the homeless; internally displaced persons now representing over 40% of the population, according to figures provided by the United Nations. More than half the buildings in Aleppo are in ruin. Buildings reduced to rubble.

One wonders how many people who originally protested their unjust conditions were for the majority as unentitled Sunnis under the yoke of the minority-population, but entitled Shia, now ruefully think of how relatively pleasant, despite the irritations, life once was for them.