El Assad and Co. introduce us to a new weapon dear world : The barrel bomb. According to Wikipedia the Syrian Air forces of Al Assad is the first to use it .. against its own people.
The first time I would see this barrel bomb on video was last week despite it has been used in Syria since March 2011 according to the opposition led Syrian National Council “SNC”.
Syrian activists showed footage for the barrels and the destruction they are causing in Daraya , Reef Dimshaq during the useless Geneva 2 talks.
Today people from a small town called Khan El Sheikh also in Reef Dimshaq witnessed another barrel attack.
Endless nightmare for Syrian between brutal regime and heartless radical regimes.
I am sorry that I do not blog anymore about Syria but things in Egypt recently make it hard for me to follow up other countries.
I never really got all the outrage over the 'barrel' bombs. A normal bomb is explosives in a metal case. In this case the metal case was originally designed for something else and is now used as a bomb case. How exactly is this morally any different from normal aviation bombs? Would people be less upset if they were standard issue Russian aviation bombs? Or car bombs? Why?
ReplyDeleteI thought about this in the past two days and I think it is because you feel there is persistence from El Assad regime to use all what they can use from weapons to kill the people , his own people
DeleteMaybe I'm jaded, but to me that's just called war. You use whatever you can to kill your enemy. If you are fighting somebody, of course you aren't going to stop when you run out conventional weapons. You either want them dead or you don't. It makes no sense to want somebody dead if you can do it with normal bombs but not if you can only do it improv. You could say the same about the 'hell cannons' or any number of other improvised weapons the rebels use to lob shells into regime areas to try to kill civilians.
DeleteAnd at this point they are no more 'his people' that the people in Georgia were 'Lincoln's people' during Sherman's march. They are the enemy, and Assad's supporters are going to try to kill them before they get killed by them. That's what war is all about, getting the other guy first.
The only way I see out of it is partition, at least in the short term. There are two large sides each of which has the probably justified belief they will be killed if the other side wins. Ergo, anything is justified to screw the other side. So the only way to end it is to assure both sides that they won't die if they lay down their arms and the only way to do that is partition since neither side trusts the other to rule it. Maybe you can put it together again in a generation but for now there is too much hate. It's not ideal at all, it leaves half of Syria under a Stalinist regime and the other under the Taliban but the only alternative I see is a lot more people dying to bring Syria under the control of either the Stalinist regime or the Taliban clones and neither of them are worth it, quite frankly.