Absorbed By The Massacre

"Four members of the [opposition] civil defense in Aleppo and ten other civilians were killed, and dozens of others wounded in a barrel bomb attack launched by helicopters against the Haydariyeh roundabout in the east of Aleppo city Sunday morning."
"A Canadian journalist, Ali Mustafa, was also killed ... as he tried to document the massacre."
Aleppo Media Center announcement

People carry a recovered body from under the rubble at a site hit by what activists said was shelling by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo's district of al-Sukari March 8, 2014. (REUTERS/Hosam Katan)

Young and passionately devoted to revealing the news, revealing the extent of the atrocities committed by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on civilians, along with the rebel opposition movement of Sunni Syrians whom the regime pounds into the dust of centuries upon centuries of Syrian nationhood. Victims abound; they simply have to be present to become dust as they are blown apart by barrel bombs. And he became one with them.

Government aircraft bombing yet another rebel-held area. And a 30-year-old photographer joins the ranks of journalists and photographers who have perished or been injured during this three-year-old festering wound in the abdomen of the Middle East. A wound that has seeped its poisonous serum toward surrounding countries, bringing the same atrocities to Lebanon and to Iraq as Shia and Sunni restore ancient animosities to livid hatred.

"[Mustafa] told me he was a photographer and offered to show me pictures he made of the protests. He pulled out his camera and started flipping through photos on the tiny screen on the back of the camera. We all gathered close around his camera and were in awe. His pictures were raw, filled with energy, very intense", recalled Patric Witty former TIME international pictures editor.

The son of Portuguese and Pakistani immigrant parents in Canada, Ali Mustafa was on his second Syrian photographic tour as a free-lancer on Sunday, re-visiting the geography he had immersed himself in his professional capacity as a spur-to-conscience through photography a year earlier. His photographs have appeared in the Guardian and the Times in the past three weeks, through the European Pressphoto Agency.

Syria is now being recognized as the most deadly place in the world for journalists to operate since the uprising began. A horrifying total of 63 journalists have been killed by both forces loyal to President Assad and by the Sunni rebels dedicated to his overthrow, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Freelancers without the backing of companies to provide them with safety training, bodyguards, equipment or insurance are the most vulnerable.

In a viciously deadly conflict with the Syrian regime demonstrating just how barbaric a national leader can become, calling upon his military to detain, arrest, torture and main, threaten and slaughter civilians whom he and they accuse of aiding and harbouring opposition forces, claiming them as enemies of the state because of their religious sectarianism, Bashar al Assad has identified himself as the most bloodthirsty of a notable succession of Islamist butchers.

The chemical attacks on sleeping civilians that took the lives of a thousand innocents earned Assad the condemnation of the international community, but Iran's intervention and Russian chess-playing saved him from consequences. He has now turned to depending on Hezbollah to form a vanguard of Islamist militarism in taking rebel strongholds back for the regime, and has added barrel bombs to his deadly arsenals assaulting suburbs in Damascus, Aleppo and elsewhere.

Barrel bombs are imprecise in their targeting. They have killed people in their hundreds after blowing apart their homes, their vehicles, their shops and their neighbourhoods. Their dread results in destruction of buildings and mangled bodies have contributed to the wholesale abandonment of entire districts, adding to the tens of thousands of Syrians who have become fearful refugees, exposed to privation and fear.

These were all things that Mr. Mustafa wanted to document, to ensure that the world knew what was happening, would have few excuses for inaction to strive to find solutions, to challenge the Baathist butcher of Syria to surrender his inhumanity to international justice. He may have succeeded in some part in alerting the international community to the horrors faced daily by ordinary Syrians, but no sign has yet emerged that their leaders are seriously engaged in solution-finding.

"I felt it was important to go there to cover the war firsthand. In a way, I'm also fascinated by war not in the gory sense but in the way it impacts us as human beings. What does it take away? What does it leave behind? Most importantly, what does it transform us into", he asked rhetorically once during an interview in 2013.

The answer, clearly is ... fascinated spectators to a scene of unstoppable carnage we cannot draw our eyes away from, while something in our consciousness tells our collective conscience that it isn't real, after all; just another display on the news media of improbably collapses of humanity.