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Warning: This site contains images and graphic descriptions of extreme violence and/or its effects. It's not as bad as it could be, but is meant to be shocking. Readers should be 18+ or a mature 17 or so. There is also some foul language occasionally, and potential for general upsetting of comforting conventional wisdom. Please view with discretion.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Syria: Shoukry al-Qouwatly Street Massacre

Shoukry al-Qouwatly Street Massacre,
Or Perhaps Not?
August 18, 2016
minor edits 8/23

I was just alerted to this important video from Sham FM in Damascus, on Facebook (still frame below): This is "Center of the capital Damascus now.." The location is not hard to pin down - a mid-day view, apparently before noon, on Shoukry al-Qouwatly Street, here on Wikimapia and facing east.

For the first minute, it's arguably boring. Taxis and a few other kinds of vehicles merge and drive normally. There are quite a few of them, but things keep moving. An unarmed traffic cop helps manage a process that hardly seems to need the help.

Then at 1:18 the bulldozer enters the scene, as shown here. It rounds the curve, and starts merging with the traffic. And then ...

... well, it carries on and keeps driving like any car. The video goes on like that a few more seconds and then ends.

Hm. I guess this is what passes for news in Syria today. Nothing blows up, busy traffic on clean streets and civility rules. Who said this was a massacre? Oh yeah, no one...

It's not a direct massacre, but surely the work of the dictator Assad and backed by all his other crimes. There's not a challenge to be seen here to his iron grip and genocide of the Sunnis. We see not one mortar shell nor sign of any recently. There are no soldiers massacred for refusing orders, no bodies rotting in the streets because of snipers. There are some embargoes but probably no one is being starved to death in basements for propaganda videos. There are no bearded fighters in ratmobiles on the street, and no public beheadings. The women aren't veiled, and Christians and Alawi can probably move about freely among the Sunni majority here. As with so much of Syria, there are also no NATO bomb falling here.

This could be the fate of Aleppo if Assad wins there. Pay attention, people. There will be no more reason for refugees to pour out of Syria. That would be one less crisis, one less reason to come and topple Assad. What's next? ISIS finally being eradicated? When will the world stand up in defense of useful crisis?

Damn this dictator and his slaves, clinging to power with the help of Russia and Iran, and their little pariah club. This kind of white-washed stability has to end in all of Syria, just like it's done in Iraq and Libya, and much of Syria. Only then can the long path to true freedom begin. And freedom, sweet freedom - that's just another word for nothing left to lose, right?

2 comments:

  1. "This kind of white-washed stability has to end in all of Syria, just like it's done in Iraq and Libya, and much of Syria." Oh, and in Yemen. And Ukraine. Mali, etc.

    ReplyDelete

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