With the fall of east Aleppo now imminent…

aleppojpg-large_IN WEEK THAT ALEPPO BESIEGED UNDER INTENSE BOMBARDMENT OF ASSAD AND RUSSIA, CALL FOR ‘PARTNERSHIP WITH RUSSIA’ IN IRISH TIMES OPED:

With the fall of east Aleppo now imminent, among the series of reports of the desperate plight of the population were one from American Dr Samer Attar who was in the last car out of Aleppo:

‘We had to stop doing CPR on a child who was severely injured in order to save someone else who was bleeding to death who we knew could be saved’. He added ‘that child could have [been saved], had we got the personnel and the resources…I saw children missing limbs, children holding their intestines in their hands, body parts on the floor…I saw parents running around looking for their children, trying to find out who is alive and who is dead. … The screaming never let up…. One nurse told me that he feels like people in Aleppo are like bugs being crushed and that the world has abandoned them.

’ -see report here: http://cnn.it/2a1tCv3 (14th July 2016).

Roy Gutman (Pulitzer prize winning reporter for A Witness to Genocide, on the 1993 ethnic cleansing of Bosnia) wrote a piece on July 12th on how the last supply route into Aleppo was cut under Syrian regime and Russian aerial bombardment, supported by Iranian troops on the ground Read more

Arab civilians suffer long struggle for self-determination

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In late 1400 and early 1401, the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane left “pyramids of skulls, like those constructed by Islamic State today” across Syria, recalls the French Middle East expert Jean-Pierre Filiu.

Tamerlane had already destroyed Aleppo. The great Arab historian and statesman Ibn Khaldun talked to him for 35 days, in the hope of savingDamascus. “The whole time, Tamerlane knows he’s going to massacre everyone in the city,” Filiu continues. “He uses the negotiation to divide and rule, to massacre more people, faster.”

Filiu wants Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, to read Ibn Khaldun, for it’s impossible not to see a parallel with the behaviour of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Read more

How the Syrian Revolution has transformed me

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Excel article explaining lack of solidarity with Syrians:

Budour Hassan on grappling with prejudices of ‘how a revolution should ‘look like’ & ‘how we should react to a movement against a purportedly pro-Palestinian regime… Until 2011, my talk about breaking borders and internationalist solidarity was but a soundbite, mere rhetorics. Thanks to the Syrian uprising, I finally understood what solidarity is really about. Syrians marched in solidarity with Gaza amid the rubble of their houses destroyed by Syrian regime air strikes. The Syrian Revolutionary Youth put out posters against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Naqab when most of the group’s members were in hiding, jails, exile, or graves.  (via Leila Al-Shami)

The world revolves around Palestine, or so I thought until 2011.

The Palestinian cause, I argued, was the litmus test for anyone’s commitment to freedom and justice. Palestine was the one and only compass that must guide any Arab revolution.  Read more

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