The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Friday 7 April 2017

HUMAN COST OF SYRIAN CIVIL WAR

On March 15 this year, Syrian civil war completed its sixth year, and going by the state of affairs now, even after the first ever direct US missile attack on a Syrian regime airbase, no end looks in sight.

The result is the human cost - the biggest human crisis since the World War II.

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, around 5,00,000 Syrians have been killed in the civil war, some 7,00,000 are trapped in various conflict theatres and over 6 million are internally displaced.

To cap it is the number of Syrian refugees. According to the UN, at the end of March 2017, the number of registered Syrian refugees, scattered in different countries, stood at 5.1 million. It is more than ten times the count of Syrian refugees in 2012. And the actual number may be even higher. Unofficial figures quote over 7 million Syrian refugees and over 12 million internally displaced.

Dependent and helpless, children are the biggest losers in any civil war. According to UNICEF, 23 million Syrian children had to flee the country while another 3 million are living in conflict theatres and cut-off regions and they need immediate help. According to the website http://www.iamsyria.org, the Syrian civil has killed around over 50,000 children.  

12 million human lives, including millions of children, dead, trapped in conflict theatres, forced to flee their homes and even their country, that is the human cost the Syrian civil war and it is still unfolding.

According to a report from the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, the ongoing Syrian civil war has wiped 11.5 per cent of the Syrian population.  

Thousands have died in their desperate rush to cross the Mediterranean Sea to find refuge in Europe, 5000 of them alone in 2016.

Thousands of them have been killed in chemical attacks. Though under international pressure, in 2013, Syria signed the Convention on Chemical Weapons that bans production, storage, use and transportation of chemical weapons, it has been alleged that Syria never disclosed its full chemical arsenal for international inspection and destruction.

And these allegations are not baseless. A recent ABC News report, quoting the White House, speaks about at least over a dozen chemical attacks in Syria since 2012. These include the chemical attack of August 2013 in Aleppo which killed around 1500 people and left thousands others crippled with symptoms of nerve gas attack. There was an international hue and cry but the responsibility could not be affixed.

Yesterday's US missile attack on a Syrian airbase was in response to a chemical attack in Syria's Idlib city which killed over 100. It was the first direct US military attack on Syria and was targeted at a Syrian airbase that was reportedly used to launch the Idlib chemical attack. Syria has denied its hands and its ally Russia has strongly defended it. On the contrary, it has blamed the Syrian rebels for the attack, like it does every time.

The never ending Syrian crisis has forced the biggest migration of people since the Second World War – a wave that countries, especially the European ones are feeling too difficult a crisis to handle. Syrians are the biggest migrants group in Europe – those who have got asylum – those who are still waiting in the ‘nowhere’ zone – and those who lost their lives while trying to reach those elusive borders of the European continent.

©SantoshChaubey