ISIS Controls Half of Syria. Four Million Have Fled.
Nearly 300,000 Have Been Killed
Millions Fleeing this Kind of Scene
Truly
an excellent article ... I have edited it to fit the blog ... please read the
entire link above - who to blame? Plenty to go around dating back decades.
The
vast majority of over 4 million Syrians who have fled the country are nowhere
near Europe – they are scattered all over Iraq, Turkey, and elsewhere, and most
of them see no way out of their desperate circumstances. One summed it up for
most saying: “The influx of our Syrian refugees has left few work opportunities
in Turkey. We don’t know what to do or where or how to live.”
A bit of history is
critical to help fully understand the mess in Syria that is in essence to
understand the refugee crisis associated with that mess — it is both a moral
horror and human tragedy that has captured the attention of the world. What
directly or indirectly has caused it?
Right now today we see
some 4 million Syrian refugees spread all over the place as a result of the
Civil War ranging there that is perhaps the most destructive conflict on Earth
right now.
The civil war itself is
immensely complicated. It has its roots in decades of Middle Eastern politics,
and certainly goes back much further that when it started at the intense it is
now since 2011. In fact, it has gone through several dramatic changes, each of which
has only made things worse for the Syrian population as a whole who suffers
most.
The catastrophe we
witness today has killed over 250,000 by most accurate counts and has forced
half of the population from their homes. We need to go back to the country's
post-colonial roots and the 1976 fighting there off and on since. That era
could be rightly called the “first round” of what we see today in the war
raging there.
Flashback to the period
from 1923 to 1946: Call it the time of French imperialism and
the ingredients for sectarianism – highlights:
After World War I, the
Ottoman Empire collapsed, and out of its ruins France took control, roughly in 1920,
of a stretch of Ottoman territory on the eastern Mediterranean, today known as
Syria and Lebanon. This territory was, and remains, quite ethnically and
religiously diverse.
One religious minority group in Syria, called the “Alawite Shia Muslims” in particular saw French colonialism as an opportunity for them to advance and no longer be just the minority religious group they had been since for a long time they had been persecuted as “heretics” by the much larger population of Sunni Muslims.
Some Alawites joined up
with French colonial authorities and in particular, they joined the newly
constructed Syrian military — a development the French welcomed as a means of
cementing their power. European colonialists like France often promoted
minority groups that would rely on them to maintain power, so the relationship
was symbiotic – they both in essence scratched each other’s backs to say in
power and thus control.
However, the French
eventually left, but the borders they had established stayed in place.
Then in 1963, the Syrian
military took power and the government quickly became dominated by Alawites.
Further, when Hafez al-Assad (current al-Assad’s father) came to power in 1970,
virtually all the top power brokers in Syria were Alawites.
That
set of circumstances created a dangerously precarious political situation that
actually continues today. The Alawites saw, and continue to see, that
maintaining a sectarian government as their best hope for securing themselves
from persecution and even massacre. But since the Sunni majority was blocked
from meaningful political power and angry about it, well… that could only lead
to internal turmoil and that is where we are today, but on a larger scale.
As
of 2010, Syria had a total population of nearly 23 million … now imagine nearly
¼ of that number leaving as refugees, perhaps more as that civil war continues
and even worse, if that’s even possible, due the dastardly deeds of ISIS, which
now by some estimates occupy nearly one half of Syria.
I add as I’ve said before
that this presents not only a humanitarian crisis but a national security set
of circumstances for the receiving countries, namely those with strong ties to
the West, and more so, those closely aligned with or close to the U.S.
In this day and age, one
can’t be paranoid enough to not see terrorism around the globe and not just
from large groups like ISIS, but smaller one or two or three man groups bents
on mass destruction and wide scale to honestly realize: it is not the U.S. to blame.
Among all the refugees as I have noted before
here and elsewhere like here that based on the images we see are a
heck of a lot of young men with all hopes lost and ripe, easy targets for ISIS
recruiters or maybe already a part of ISIS and just getting planted in new
locations. That is neither paranoid nor far-fetched thinking. Let's face
it, what better way to get your guys into a country than disguised as poor
hungry and refugees in need?
It is serious food for
thought and hearty discussion isn’t it? I totally believe that it is.
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