Syria's Gaunt Geographic Corpse

"The world's silence today -- as hundreds of civilians are slaughtered; hospitals destroyed in precision strikes; elderly men shot dead and burned on the street; and hundreds of thousands of people are forced to flee, some on foot -- risks gifting HTS [al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] with a narrative win on the revolutionary street."
Charles Lister, director, Countering Terrorism and Extremism, Middle East Institute

All quiet in Western media and Western attention on the Syrian front. There was a time, when the Syrian regime began its meticulous all-out assault on its Syrian Sunni rebel population that the world was transfixed with incredulity at the stories published daily in mainstream media of a government that set out to 'punish' a rebellion that began as a quiet protest against second-class citizenship of Sunnis under an Alawite-Shiite regime.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad spoke contemptuously of those groups he forced into rebellion as 'terrorists', they were scum, beneath his notice other than to quell the revolt against his dictatorship. It took little time before Assad, welcome up to then in Western capitals, was to be recognized as a brutal mass butcher, one who directed  his military to bomb areas of Aleppo and even Damascus with Sunni Syrian neighbourhoods.

Syrians check the damage of destroyed houses after an air strike destroyed at least ten houses in the town of Azaz on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2012. (AP / Khalil Hamra)

Even children, if they were naive enough to indulge in public defiance, were not immune to arrest, torture and death. Syrian Sunni-majority towns were treated to chemical attacks where children were rushed to hospitals and medical clinics to save their lives. Soon enough hospitals and medical clinics and their personnel themselves came under attack. People waiting in bread lines were shot down by military attack helicopters.

Shaam News Network / Reuters  After a bloody, week-long siege in the Syrian capital, residents who stayed behind are facing hours-long lines for gasoline and bread, stinking piles of garbage in the streets and scenes of destruction unimaginable in a city that had long been spared the worst ravages of the country’s uprising

Infamously, the Syrian regime was warned by the Obama White House that the use of chemical weapons would not be tolerated; their use would be interpreted as a war crime should they cross that 'red line'. As the civil war reaches past its tenth year of bloody conflict it was six years ago that the figure of 400,000 deaths attributed to the regime's response to the rebellion was estimated. The mass movement of Syrians attempting to evade death saw millions of Syrians displaced within Syria and millions more becoming refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Reuters    Patients were hosed down with water to remove any chemicals on their skin

Then came the barrel bombs, shattering neighbourhoods of apartment buildings, businesses, schools, hospitals into concrete smithereens, destroying life, creating hundreds of thousands of homeless trudging away from what had once been their cities and towns, their homes, their farms, their villages. Everything noted, discussed, published and decried. The United Nations deplored all of the destruction, the loss of lives, the demolishing of heritage sites, the ongoing slaughter.

The Islamic Republic of Iran dispatched its al Quds force of the Republican Guard Corps to help direct strategy. Iran's proxy terrorist militia marched out of Lebanon and into Syria to fight alongside the Syrian military, aligned now against the entry of foreign jihadists whose Sunni forces saw an opportunity in a vicious sectarian war to help unseat a Shiite tyrant; not out of humanitarian concern but through the lens of historical tribal, sectarian hatreds.

And then, the opportunity arose for Russia to establish a deep-sea port and an air base, which led to Russian President Vladimir Putin offering air support to the regime, to turn what had become a stalemate into a rout, turning the tide of opportunity in Assad's favour as they worked in tandem, Russian air might bombing rebel-held areas, softening up the militias for battlefield incursions of the Syrian army.

Turkish and Russian patrol seen near the town of Darbasiyeh, November 2019

What remains in the ghost geography of Syria is the Idlib governorate held by Syrian resistance. There 200 Russian bombs demolished towns deserted by their residents. Hundreds of thousands of new refugees have streamed out onto highways trudging en masse in a northerly direction toward the closed Turkish border. A half million people driven from homes in Idlib in the six months between April to December. Another half million joining them in the last week alone, some from the Aleppo governorate.

To assemble in growing, putrid, ill-equipped refugee camps lacking facilities during a cold and miserable Syrian winter. Months ago UN human rights office spokesman Rupert Colville spoke of 61 hospitals and clinics bombed by the Russian air force and Assad's barrel bombers in Idlib. Another 53 health facilities in Idlib shuttered according to the World Health Organization. "Idlib has been transformed into something like a large concentration camp" president of MedGlobal stated. Under a ceasefire arrangement.

Syrian government ground forces advanced towards Douma   AP

Syria had a pre-war population of 23 million, half driven from their homes, by last April. Millions more as refugees, hoping to be welcomed in Europe or North America. Flooding Europe to claim refugee haven. Another million are living under tarpaulins in tent encampments. The UN no longer collects and analyzes the death toll. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights placed the death count two years ago at 560,000. The Syrian Network for Human Rights counted another 98,000 people "disappeared" by the regime.

This is an example of how followers, the faithful of the 'religion of peace' view one another, react to each other, exact a toll of historical enmity one against the other in horrendous slaughter and displacement. Perhaps the world has grown indifferent to the enmities that Islam engenders within itself. That a non-Arab Middle East, nuclear-aspiring Shiite nation seeking the ultimate power it once held  historically roils the fragile stability of majority Sunni Arab states.

And another non-Arab Muslim state seeks to return to Ottoman-era domination in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. The death count in Syria meanwhile is so large, the refugee situation so acute, the destruction so complete, the hatred so deeply entrenched, it is beyond the comprehension of most sane and literate people who feel they can no longer absorb any more details of an internecine war without end.

Russian military police stand near an armored personnel carrier in Syria's Hasakeh province on Oct. 24, 2019. DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images