Cambiar News
They say home is where the heart is, and my home is Syria – a home that is now is destroyed; a home where my people are dying.
While the barbaric killing of innocent Syrians has sucked the life and soul out of everyone who has witnessed it, what hurts even more – if that is possible – is that the world continues to spin as if nothing is wrong; we paint a happy picture, plaster smiles on our faces and close our eyes to how ugly our world has become.
It is no secret that the situation in Syria is unbearable, but let’s rewind a couple of years, to March 2011. The conflict in Syria was begun by a group of young teenage boys who wrote on their school walls, “The Government Must Go.”
To put it briefly, the movement began as an uprising for democracy, freedom of speech and a call for basic human rights, since the Assad family has been in dictatorship for 45 years. The government responded with armed forces as demonstrations quickly spread across the country, peacefully asking for democracy. Yet, in the last five years, the Assad regime has continued killing innocent Syrian civilians as they seek to maintain their power, whilst the country has disintegrated due to competing rebel groups, international powers, ISIS and the conflicts between religious factions.
The Syrian Civil War has become the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, with 470,000 deaths, 1,500,000 civilians injured and 11,000,000 displaced.
The Assad government, with the help of Russia, has targeted and bombed the majority of hospitals, schools, bakeries, mosques and churches in the country. Yet, they claim to be targeting terrorists. I didn’t realize you had to kill innocent civilians every day for 5 years straight to defeat terrorism. Are you trying to convince me that Russia, one of the most powerful countries in the world, doesn’t have the technology to find specific targets without killing the innocent in the process? Or is it time to admit that the innocent is their target?
The situation in Syria is no longer a civil war, but a genocide with daily terror attacks on defenseless civilians. The world has become too caught up with the political issues of the country while we forget that real people are suffering the consequences. And no, Syrians don’t need empathy; they need action – something that the law clearly fails to see. In fact, the international law didn’t fail Syria; the world failed to enforce the international law. The purpose of the UN was to end and prevent conflict and to find diplomatic solutions, but the organization has failed to do this in every aspect in this war-torn country.
Syria is a story of a nation that dared to seek freedom and dignity in a world that values neither; Syrians have shown nothing but bravery, courage and unity in hopes of ‘winning’ basic human rights one day. Unless the Assad regime is held accountable for 45 years of dictatorship, there will be no justice for us. Unless this barbaric torture is questioned, Syrians will continue to wake up in the morning with one constant thought; ‘A bomb might end my life today.’