The Syrian Catastrophe

The world is appalled at the vision of a three-year-old child washed up on a beach in Turkey. All attention is fixated on the three year old who drowned with his five-year-old brother and his mother, in an ill-begotten attempt, the third this family had attempted, to cross briefly from the Turkish coast to find haven in Europe. Only one news item touched on the pink-clad little girl's body found alongside Alan Kurdi's. The fact is that thousands of Syrian children have been killed in the four-year civil war.

Photos: Newseum

Syria's tyrant has barrel-bombed the major cities of Aleppo and Homs. Syrian teens were not exempted from torture sessions if they were Sunnis and suspected of having no respect for the Alawite government busy oppressing and tormenting them. The genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad has brought in reinforcements in his war against Syria's Sunni majority population. Hezbollah terrorist units and Shabiha death squads have all done their part in terrorizing and violating the human rights of Sunni Syrians.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is guilty of mass atrocities; of mass bloodshed, mass rapes, mass slavery, and of bombing and capturing Kurdish and Sunni towns and villages, but it is the Syrian regime that has eclipsed the total number of dead Syrians and refugees in its four-year battle against its own. There were ten other bodies found on the beach besides the toddler's. All together one day alone 200 refugees drowned as their boats capsized off the coast of Libya. Up to 2,500 Syrians have drowned in the Mediterranean this year.

The U.S.-led air coalition with nine NATO countries signed on, along with a few Arab nations had been launched in a military mission to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIL. A year of strikes and little has actually been accomplished because ISIL has learned how to protect itself; it seems a particular specialty of rogue Arab forces to integrate themselves wholly in civilian enclaves as assurance that Western sensibilities would never bomb the innocent along with the guilty.

Bashar al-Assad has no such foolish inhibitions. In towns and villages where Sunni Syrian rebels are known to be present, or even suspected to be in evidence, the civilians are unmercifully bombed, their homes destroyed and their lives as well; barrel bombs are viciously geared to extract maximum damage from human flesh and from concrete and steel alike.

A man drives a motorcycle on July 15 near damaged buildings in Aleppo, Syria. Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters

The chemical-weapons pact that was reached to keep the United States from making good on its warning of red lines in the sand with the use of same is ancient history; the chemicals packed off for safekeeping and destruction elsewhere, but somehow, those chemical attacks just keep on coming. A quarter of a million Syrians have surrendered their lives to Bashar al-Assad's genocidal revenge against disloyal trash portraying themselves as Syrian citizens.

Seven million Sunni Syrians have been "internally displaced", their lives become miserable points of existence without comfort of any measure. Another four million Syrians have become refugees, living in squalid camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, barely subsisting, with the United Nation's refugee agency short in the funding it requires to provide the most basic of human needs. With Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States awash in oil riches, mysteriously none finds its way to humanitarian aid.

And it is Europe that tasks itself with the responsibility to respond to the humanitarian disaster that the flood of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East has unleashed through Islam unleashing its distemper against its own in one paroxysm after another of tribal, ethnic and sectarian rage on the people faithful to Islam. Mostly, it is Syrians who suffer this degradation of life's purpose, but there are Libyans, there are Afghans, and countless others.

The International Organization for Migration in Geneva holds that roughly 237,00 people set out across the Mediterranean in unseaworthy ships bound for Europe. And those fearing those perilous sea voyages seek alternately to travel overland, in a prolonged and difficult journey to arrive eventually at the lintels of Europe where countries like Greece and Macedonia, Hungary and Italy can no longer cope with the human tide of misery.

ISIL's war on all that is decent in human nature is abysmally dreadful, but Assad's uncompromising war on his own people represents a series of atrocities inflicted on suffering people by a man obsessed with maintaining power, whom the real world powers feel constrained from opposing for no good reason whatever. A coalition of determined European and NATO nations assembling their combined armies could readily albeit painfully clear away the wreckage of human rights.

Instead, nothing is done to remove the tyrant for fear of upsetting Russia and Iran, both of whom must be appeased for reasons that speak of doom and gloom and additional miseries inflicted on a world unprepared for a third world war.