Priorities

"All the aid we are giving is like a pain killer, but the killing machine will continue to kill people and to create refugees and people will continue to need medical treatment and other things. 
"The Russian government is very serious about winning the war. The U.S. and other countries want to talk and to have meetings in Geneva. It is only when the international community decides that Assad will go that the killing will stop."
IT specialist Louay Sakka, Syrian Support Group, Oakville, Ontario

Nearly six million people representing almost a third of the Syrian population are now homeless. They are refugees of the sectarian violence that is tearing their country apart. They flee the violence, entire communities uprooted, families desperate to survive the mounting chances of death visited upon them either by the regime, determined to brutally bring an end to the Sunni-led revolution, or in cross-fire between the military and the rebels.

Most of the Syrian refugees live in a state of removal from immediate danger and face other dangers instead; physical and psychological insecurity, food and water shortages, no medical attention, and fear for the lives and well-being of their children, both for the present and beyond, into the uncertain future. The towns, villages and cities that were once intact and represented their ancestral homes are now mere vestiges of what they once represented; shattered infrastructure remains.

A million and a half Syrian refugees have migrated for safe haven to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey; fewer to Iraq and Egypt. There they live in vast, rambling refugee camps, while a handful with money, live in cities where they are able to pay for their accommodation and their needs, some even finding basic employment. The vast majority live in tent camps, dependent on food and water handouts and basic medical attention.

What began as a tentative, expectant protest with the hope that President Bashar al Assad might respond by recognizing that the country's Sunni majority's wish for equality under his reign could be feasible in the interests of social harmony quickly degenerated into a brutal no-holds-barred crackdown on protesters who in response became instant rebels and the Free Syrian Army and an official Opposition was born.

The Arab League, looking on, along with Western powers indulge in wishful thinking -- that they can persuade the belligerents, each now so hatefully estranged from notional civility and a shared nationhood by the virulent divisions of sectarian hostility -- to agree to meeting across a peace conference table for the purpose of hammering out mutually agreed-upon initiatives to lead to peace and a shared government.

A restoration of the nation into a cohesive whole is ruefully envisioned, but not by the Baathist Alawite regime and not by the Syrian National Coalition. Hopes that the opportunistic jihadists would melt their way out of the country back to the conflicts from which they absented themselves elsewhere, will certainly not materialize. Syria is in danger of destroying its infrastructure, its civil service, its ancient heritage.

The G-8 presented a Russian-demanded watering down of a proposal so weakly ineffectual that no one can possibly entertain positive expectations of it. The possibility of a free and democratic Syria emerging from the raging violence of this sectarian civil war is as remote as wildfires raging out of control in Antarctica.

But Brigadier-general Salim Idriss, leading his 80,000-strong Free Syrian Army still begs for NATO to establish a no-fly zone, to open and protect a humanitarian corridor, and to provide him with adequate arms to match those of the regime. After all, the White House has acknowledged that the Assad regime has used sarin gas.

And while the Syrian National Coalition acknowledges charitable assistance in welfare-directed funding from Western democracies to help humanitarian NGOs and the United Nations cope with the burdensome tasks of looking after the welfare of Syria's millions of war refugees, it, along with the Free Syrian Army would very much like to be in receipt of anti-tank, anti-aircraft missiles.