COLUMN: Syria: What will remain?
Statistics can be numbing. News stories print every day with catastrophic numbers, and the meaning behind them is lost; they become just digits. However, try not to be jaded toward the following number: 140,041. That is the death toll from the Syrian Civil War, according to the Syrian Observatory for Civil Rights in mid-February.
Really think about what that means: 140,041 individuals have died in Syria in roughly the past two to three years. Soldiers, fathers, mothers, children; it is mass exodus, mass genocide, and it doesn’t appear to be close to ending any time soon. But it needs to.
When the violence finally ends, what will be left? The country’s infrastructure is a target to both government and rebel forces. Hospitals, schools and government buildings lie in heaps. Whoever is in control can’t use them. In addition to the gross death toll, 9 million people have either sought refuge in other countries or are displaced within Syria. That’s over 40 percent of the population. Who will the governing body that remains when the dust settles even govern?
The fourth largest city in the country of Jordan is a Syrian refugee camp. Syrian refugees now make up a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
What end is in sight? Rebel and government forces trade cities back and forth, taking more casualties every day. Bombs are set off in Lebanon to send a message to outside forces while Israel carries out pre-emptive security strikes on bordering military bases and Turkey shoots down Syrian planes that cross into its air space. Mediated peace talks stall and cease-fires end. It seems hopeless and futile. It seems like a dead end. Because of this, we become numb to the true horror of the situation.
The situation is a display of gross irresponsibility of both the Syrian government and the rebels to the civilians. Neither side deserves to govern a country after releasing chemical weapons on citizens, dropping barrels of gasoline and nails at random and taking down hospitals just so the opposition can’t use them.
There will be no winners by the time the Syrian Civil War ends. There will only be those to answer for the depletion of a population of a country. There will only be those who try to rebuild infrastructure without sufficient means. There will only be those with the blood of 140,000-plus and counting on their hands.
– Jeffrey Dahdah is a sophomore majoring in journalism. He has dual citizenship to the United States and to Jordan and is concerned with issues in the Middle East. If you have something you would like to say to him you can email him at dahdahjm@gmail.com or tweet him @dahdahUSU.