Today is a grim day, one during which we all need to pause for a moment and remember the suffering endured by Syrians over the past three years.
It was on this day, three years ago, that the first protests against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad broke out in Dara’a to spread countrywide. Since then, more than a thousand dawns have broken over Syria as the struggle against the regime continues.
The figures are indeed stupefying, beggaring disbelief and shock at the sheer scale of the unabated struggle inside Syria. Since the revolt began, more than 140,000 men, women and children have lost their lives during this darkest chapter in that nation’s long and proud history. Exact numbers of the dead are difficult to ascertain because of the viciousness of the fighting, the hatred that has divided families and pitted brother against brother, son against father.
What can be said for certain is that the scale of the fighting has left more than nine million Syrians displaced. Half have sought shelter elsewhere within the broken country. Millions more have left everything behind and now live as displaced and refugees, seeking aid from the international organisations that struggle to keep pace with the demand. Hundreds of thousands more eke out a bare existence as illegal workers in Arab countries, clinging to whatever vestiges of national pride they can salvage from the detritus of their broken life outside Syria.
Within that troubled nation, at least a quarter of a million are being slowly starved into submission, caught up in besieged towns and neighbourhoods, where the only common currency is blood and suffering, where the only common calories are cats and dogs and weeds growing in the bombed-out ruins.
This is a three-year struggle that has no end in sight. There is no unity in the international community to say “enough”. Efforts at international mediation have been failures barring some token gesture to at least live the lie that there remains an ounce of compassion, a spoonful of humanity.
All that remains is suffering — in sad abundance.
