THE Syrian ceasefire that never really was is now surely over with the murder by airstrike of three doctors and at least 14 patients in a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Aleppo. It is unclear if the warplanes were Russian or Bashar Assad’s, but the slaughter was just as real.
It should not be forgotten that as in Kunduz, Afghanistan last October, all sides were made aware of the location of the MSF hospital. Tragically this information did not stop US warplanes from blasting the Kunduz hospital, killing 42 doctors, nurses and patients and injuring 33 others. The Americans subsequently apologized for a targeting error and those responsible are supposedly being disciplined.
No such apology has been forthcoming from either Damascus or Moscow and none is remotely likely. The brutal truth is that in Syria, hospital patients whether civilian or military are seen as legitimate targets in a campaign to utterly crush the Syrian people. Anything that can reduce to utter misery the lives of those still resisting Assad’s army in Aleppo is considered legitimate in the eyes of the oppressors. And it is a matter of complete indifference that MSF is a medical charity devoted to the care of the sick and injured regardless of who or where they are. Like the Red Crescent and the Red Cross, MSF does not take sides. The only cause it serves is common humanity. As such it is an obvious target for a regime so steeped in blood and savagery, which has been sustained by Russia and Iran.
It would be good to imagine that the pilots responsible for this latest atrocity, along with the commanders and political leaders who ordered the raid, will one day be brought to justice. Sadly, however, the attack on the MSF hospital is just one more war crime in a list of horrors that almost defies belief. In terms of the standard depravity to which Assad and his Russian and Iranian friends have sunk, there is nothing exceptional about what happened in Aleppo.
The UN mediator Staffan de Mistura has called on Washington and Moscow to intervene to save the ceasefire. It is like calling on a cripple to dance and a snake to walk on two feet. Barack Obama’s failure to intervene decisively when he vowed he would has crippled US Syrian policy. Putin’s military intervention struck venom into the Free Syrian Army and checked their steady advances against the Assad regime. The rebellion is suffering from paralysis. Moscow is doing little or nothing to assault the terrorists of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) whose existence Assad has finessed in his efforts to cling desperately to power.
So while Washington leads the outside world in wringing its hands uselessly on the sidelines, the slaughter continues. Yet more bodies are being added to the hundreds of thousands who have already died. Yet more people, most of them civilians, have been maimed for life. Yet more tens of thousands have been added to the millions who have already been forced to flee their homes.
This is the terrible price for Obama’s greatest failure - a country and its people in bloody ruins, with no obvious end to the carnage and destruction. And Obama imagines that his greatest foreign policy achievement is his rapprochement with Iran, one of the key culprits in the seemingly endless disaster that is Syria.
