I feel it is important to keep the news alive when it starts to fade out of the public consciousness. No matter how many times I watch this video which was made a year ago, the complexities confound me and the scale of suffering I cannot imagine.
Quick facts:
There are more than 4.7 million Syrian refugees. More than 13.5 million need assistance inside Syria. Half the country’s pre-war population- more than 11 million people have been killed or forced to flee their homes.
More than 250,000 people have been killed. Some say between 300,000 and 470,000. What is certain that it will have gone up from when you started reading this.
To see all the names of all the children would take over 19 hours.
Andrew Mitchell MP was a stand-in speaker at a dinner I went to this week. He was co-Chair with the late Jo Cox MP of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria and I was struck by how passionately he spoke with such force and knowledge on the situation in Syria. The cycle of violence and political cowardice that marked Kosovo, Rwanda and Bosnia, and Iraq now walks unopposed across more innocent men women and children leaving it’s legacy of destruction and contempt for humanity. Five years on and it looks as intractable as ever. Aleppo, a city of 6000 years of history to be reduced to rubble by Christmas. A politically negotiated settlement which makes room for aid and treatment of the wounded is the only way forward. In the face of such continuing atrocities surely reasonable means of getting them around the table should justify the needed peaceful resolution for the besieged.
Thanks to Mercycorps.org.uk for the statistics and BBC