More Syrian atrocities
munitions falling from the sky on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the Idlib province. The town is held by rebels opposed to President Bashar al-assad but, as is often the case, the innocents were the ones who suffered.
Experts say only the Assad regime or its Russian sponsors have the aircraft capable of conducting such an attack. Both have denied doing so, although a US State Department official said the raid was ‘‘almost certainly’’ carried out by Assad’s forces and had the appearance of a war crime. Un-backed investigations have found Assad’s regime was responsible for three previous chemical attacks.
US President Donald Trump called the latest incident reprehensible and said it could not be ignored by the civilised world. However, he also used it to blame and attack his predecessor Barack Obama’s ‘‘weakness and irresolution’’ in not enforcing a ‘‘red line’’ over chemical weapons use in Syria in 2013.
This sequence of events helps illustrate how a lack of resolve and common purpose between world powers with the capability to act has helped exacerbate the plight of the Syrian people, even before the US and Russia ended up on different sides in what some see as a proxy Cold War. Some believe this week’s chemical attack was enabled by a more explicit signal from the White House that defeating Isis, and not removing Assad, was at the top of Trump’s Syrian agenda.
In the meantime, the suffering continues and its enormity is almost unimaginable. About 400,000 have died and 11 million have been forced out of their homes.
Many of those displaced have joined the risky exodus of refugees towards Europe, but one statistic helps to put this human catastrophe into context – the Syrians seeking sanctuary in European countries amount to just 6 per cent of the people forced away from their homes by conflict. They are the lucky ones.
Millions are stranded in Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon, but the bulk of them, perhaps 7 million, are classified as ‘‘internally displaced persons’’ still within Syria. For these people, the danger does not end.
Little New Zealand cannot do much, but neither can it ignore the scale of this tragedy. Reviewing our paltry refugee quota is a good place to start.