The Leading Role in Slaughter, Refugees

The United Nations through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees paid service to World Refugee Day yesterday. It issued press releases hoping to inform the global public about human rights conditions related to its mandate. Hoping as well to elicit support for people forced to flee persecution and violence.

An Afghan refugee family walks to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) headquarters in Islamabad. — File photo by Reuters

It is estimated that there are now more refugees in the world than at any other time since the end of the Second World War when a mass upheaval took place involving all of Europe, North America, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and other countries of the world. Syria has now overtaken Pakistan in the number of refugees seeking shelter from conflict. In Pakistan it was desperate Afghans. In Syria it is desperate Syrians.

Africa itself has generated countless desperate migrants, hoping to escape wars in their countries of origin. These are tribal, ethnic, religious wars of inhumane ferocity whose bloodshed wracks the conscience of the world. None, however, much more than the conflict taking place in the Middle East, however.

There, terrorists who proclaim themselves ardent and pious adherents of a world religion second in its total membership to Christianity, conduct atrocities whose horrendous impact is so mind-numbing that sane people fully understand that this is a mass psychosis of stunning proportions, where tribalism, ethnicity and religious sectarianism has turned masses of people into dedicated slaughterers.

A general view of Azraq refugee camp, Jordan. Photograph: Muhammad Hamed/Reuters

In the case of Syria, it is not merely the Islamists who have gathered there from other points of conflict in North Africa and the Middle East, but the state itself which has committed atrocities beyond the imagination of a well-balanced mind. Syria is now distinguished, as a result of its civil war, as having generated the largest refugee flow in the 21st Century.

Syrian civilians of Sunni Muslim sectarianism are deliberately targeted for death by their very own government. Between 2013 and 2014, Syrian refugees increased in number from 500,000 to over two million. Fully 6.5-million Syrians are now internally displaced, living in squalid refugee camps, desperate to escape their misery.

Not only has the regime of its President, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons on his own people, he has also developed a crude barrel-bomb technique of bombing them into death and destruction of their homes. Those who have not left in terror remain behind to scrabble for any vestiges of food available, enabling the regime to enforce a blockade where no food, medicine or aid can reach them.

According to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, one Syrian family is displaced within the country every 60 seconds. The average rate of monthly registration of refugees by UNHCR has exceeded 100,000, over half of them under the age of 18. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have been overwhelmed; Jordan and Turkey having had to absorb one million each of fleeing Syrians.

The violent upheavals taking place in Syria between battle-hardened Sunni Islamist jihadis and the regime's Shia military augmented by Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah, and Iran's Republican Guard contingents, has spilled its sectarian hatreds over into Lebanon and Iraq, threatening to ignite the entire region into an unstoppable conflagration of mass destruction and slaughter.

Almost everywhere that such conflicts arise in the world today, with the terrorists of Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and their ilk, spreading fear, violence and death in their celebration of martyrdom, Islam plays the leading role.