The renewed bombardment of civilians in Aleppo is a gross crime against humanity that the entire world needs to recognise and take joint action to do everything possible to stop. Innocent families and children are caught up in a disgraceful war in which the armed forces are attacking civilians as a regular part of their shocking campaign.
The horrors of the civil war in Syria have now been highlighted by world powers at the United Nations where they traded accusations of barbarity and war crimes. Syrians have lived in terrible conditions, with an appalling loss of life for many years, but now the outside world has joined in their fury following the failure of the Russia-America-backed ceasefire. After the short-lived and ineffectual truce came to an end, the Americans alleged that the Russians were never very serious about making it work and used it to get Bashar Al Assad’s regime forces into a better position.
Following the collapse of the ceasefire, regime forces pounded opposition-held eastern Aleppo with renewed intensity killing large numbers of civilians. In New York, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told the Security Council that Russian support of Al Assad’s deadly offensive was “not counterterrorism, it is barbarism”. She pointed out that for many years regime forces have besieged and bombarded civilian areas, used chemical weapons and tortured with terrible savagery tens of thousands of people in Syria’s prisons. She taunted the Russians that they have never asked for any investigations into any of these horrors.
The Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin made a countercharge that the US-led coalition’s support for the opposition was hampering humanitarian efforts, and he added that the US needed to stop backing what Russia describes as terrorist Islamist groups. “The humanitarian situation in Aleppo could have been normalised in August but that was not done because the armed groups prevented it,” said Churkin.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was right to use the words “war crimes” when he listed the regime’s air strikes using incendiary weapons and bombs on densely populated areas. He was right to say that he was “appalled” by the military escalation in Aleppo and that the use of bunker-busting bombs “brings the violence to new depths of barbarity.” But the people in Aleppo need more than words and they need international action to try and end the gross violence.
