The Children of Syria

By Peter Koenig

March 21, 2016 "Information Clearing House" -  There is no other species, no other biological being on this planet that for no necessity at all destroys its own species for sheer greed and power.

Hardly anybody talks about and shows the horrendous situation in Syria on the ground, how this US instigated war affects the people, the individuals - and in particular the children. No future. Three million of them (UNICEF) do not go to school; they are malnourished, many sick, many die - miserable deaths, in unsanitary refugee camps; uncounted children are orphans at young age - have to fend for themselves, are being abused, exploited, mistreated, physically and mentally. 

What a future? What a life. – Add to these 3 million from Syria alone the uncounted children from Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan – and the list goes on. All of these children were made homeless and refugees and many also orphans through wars and armed conflicts started by the US and its western ‘allies’.

Be sure always to remember, who is behind these conflicts; who could stop the misery anytime and who has the power to bring peace to humanity rather than constant war and mass killings to satisfy their greed – greed for dominance, greed for resources.

According to the UNHCR about 60 million people worldwide are on the move as refugees. This figure in reality is probably at least 70 million. It also masks another reality - one of abject poverty and misery, caused by a US-led world elite living in superb luxury and comfort, killing for more wealth and more power. The number of children can only be estimated. It is fair to guess that at least 1/3 of all refugees are children and adolescents, some 25 million. Again, most of these worldwide refugees are the result of US aggressions or conflicts initiated by Washington and carried out by US / NATO armed forces, or by America’s vassals and proxies, i.e. the war in Yemen nominally fought by the Saudis and other Gulf states, but with full backing and arms supplied by the US / NATO.

Young girls and adolescent women are often ending up in the sex-trade. Many of the boys and girls are abused as slaves or at best cheap, hardly-paid labor, working at least 12-hour days and of course – no chance of going to school – a missed opportunity to get a basic education. – What will they do in the future? - Those who may one day be ‘free’ from seeking shelter as refugees, free from slavery and able to enter a ‘normal’ work life?

The number of refugees is increasing with every bombing run by the US and NATO; by drone assassinations, yes, personally approved by Obama, the self-appointed leader of the world who goes around the globe preaching human rights, the biggest human rights abuser in recent history. US drones have killed tens of thousands in the last 15 years. To that you may add the hundreds, perhaps thousands killed by UK and French drones. At least 90% of those killed are civilians, many of them, maybe as many as half, are children or adolescents.

Many children survive as orphans. Especially when the trigger-happy drone-trained operators in Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas or elsewhere on the US territory, or the US Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, Djibouti, direct their joysticks towards a wedding or funeral celebration in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan – you name it. They have a particular liking for these mass family gatherings. The ‘bug splats’ – military slang for people killed by remote control – are the most numerous, the most fun, the bloodiest ‘bang for the buck’, for these inhuman monsters, trained to kill in places tens of thousands of kilometers away from their comfort zone – and ordered to do so by the Assassin-in-chief, Obama; he who proudly says that he approves each killing personally. How does the man – if he still deserves the term – sleep at night?

Many of these drone ‘pilots’ work from mobile air-conditioned trailers outside large cities in the US, but also from Africa, Afghanistan or the United Arab Emirates. There are at least 60 drone bases around the world, most of them controlled by the CIA and their proxies. Their number may be flexible with a tendency to grow. They are often operating from simple airstrips, easy to set up and easy to dismantle. They are clad in a shroud of secrecy, therefore difficult to monitor. This is modern American warfare, by robot, removed from emotions. Killing is a mere statistic, a measure accounted for on a spreadsheet. Almost nobody talks about this atrocious way of combat that is easily and painlessly replicated everywhere and endlessly.

How can a future Syria be built without an educated population? There will be a generation gap, for several generations – if ever – before the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region can recuperate its economy, its social and physical infrastructure – its sheer living of normal lives. Syria, Libya and Iraq were the most progressive countries in MENA: free education and health care; a first-class social safety net and physical infrastructure that functioned; a deep and profound history of humanity, the cradle of our western civilization. No more. The very ‘western civilization’ has destroyed it all. Bombed into oblivion. They were and Syria still is socialist by definition – a red flag and no-go for the western neoliberal fascist way of thinking and economic model.

Most of these people have done no harm, are no terrorists, especially the children, they were happy to go to school, to play with their friends, to have a home and caring family and daily food on the table. Now everything is lost. No home. Street children, begging, eating from the gutters, sick, torn and filthy clothing, cold, no shelter – no health care – no care at all. Washington and Washington directed stooges have taken away their future, have plunged them into misery, those that have survived and are roaming the globe as ‘refugees’. What a western sanitized term out of the handbook on statistics – when these poor souls are more often than not at the edge of survival, expulsed from one country to another, beaten, threatened with guns, sometimes killed, hovering between a life of despair and death from starvation, disease or sheer neglect.

Because the greed-driven neoliberal western colonialists - the same Europeans and some of them have become North Americans in the 18th, 19th and 20th century - who have ravaged and raped and exploited the world for centuries, these same people - can they still be called people? - are now decimating and destroying what’s left of our globe, for full spectrum dominance. 

Killing is the new normal. Desolation and misery of living beings is of no importance. Interference without limitation, that is what the west does best, literally best. They have perfected an evil science: how to create a chaos of suffering and misery efficiently, with the least effort, at least cost - bombs, drones – poison gas, spent uranium, GMOs, and finally - the atom bomb - eradicating all. By chaos you divide and conquer.

Paradise going up in flames, taking evil humanity with it – safe for a few indigenous people, who have lived all their lives and are still living close and with nature. They may become the founders of a new humanity. 

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.