Syria’s future lies in ruins

William Dalrymple writes: Few forms of conflict are so damaging to a country or its people as a prolonged civil war. By 1939, when Franco’s forces had finished mopping up the last Republican resistance in Spain, more than half a million lay dead and some of the most beautiful city centres in Europe had been destroyed.

A similar pattern played out in 1970s Lebanon, which saw 150,000 casualties and the almost complete destruction of the elegant villas of Ottoman Beirut. In Afghanistan it was not Soviet invasion or occupation that killed most people or wrecked Kabul, but the internecine street fighting that followed in the early 1990s. In a few years, as Masood‘s rockets fell on Pashtun neighbourhoods of Kabul, and Hekmatyar’s forces emptied the Tajik suburbs, palaces and museums were looted; while in the Shomali plain, Gandharan Buddhist sites were serially plundered of their treasure.

Today, as Syria faces the desperate prospect of an open-ended civil conflict, traumatised by its 20,000 dead and 250,000 refugees – the human cost of the war – it may seem trivial to mourn the speed with which its astonishing archaeological and architectural heritage is disappearing. But while the human pain inflicted by torture and killing is immeasurable, the destruction of a people’s heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. With modern weaponry it only takes a few months of concerted shelling for the history of an entire people to be reduced to rubble. [Continue reading…]

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5 thoughts on “Syria’s future lies in ruins

  1. David Evans

    For Israel: Mission accomplished in Syria:

    Besides Israel’s working strategy of fracturing all challengers to its ongoing aggression and expansion plans, Syria is the conduit through which defensive weapons flow from Iran to Israel’s victims in Lebanon and Gaza (and others). This is the primary reason both are being undermined by Israel and its US-Zionist supporters.

  2. Paul Woodward

    I accept the general premise that Israel views the region through the prism of divide-and-rule and that Israel’s allies and Iran’s enemies would welcome Syria’s ties with Iran being severed. Having said that, the revolution in Syria has fuck all to do with Israel. The driving force is the desire of ordinary Syrians to topple a brutal regime.

  3. Norman

    Toppling a brutal regime by ordinary citizens of that country, with the help of the western war machine, has produced chaos, infrastructure destruction, civilian deaths in the hundreds of thousands/millions, displacing the innocent victims in the name of, pick your poison. The money is available to destroy, but isn’t there when the war is over and it’s time to rebuild. Iraq & Libya come to mind off the top here. Perhaps, if the planners were to don the uniform and lead the charge at the front, caution would be the at the top of the list, instead of somebodies after thought buried in the rubble.

  4. Joe

    Do you still support the ‘rebels’ then Paul? And do you still think that they are a totally independent force, and largely, a natural and spontaneous rebellion of the Syrian people? Last time I checked, you did not want to believe they had funding from William Hague, Clinton et al. and you laughed at the very idea that there may be extremists amongst the ‘rebel’ militias.

    I wonder what your view is now?

  5. Paul Woodward

    Let’s put it this way: the people of Syria have a right to live their lives without being controlled by a brutal regime. Bashir al-Assad was politely asked to step down and has responded by killing over 30,000 fellow Syrians.

    I have never disputed that those fighting against the regime cover a broad political spectrum, nor that they are receiving some foreign support. What would a ‘totally independent force’ look like? Self-sufficient fighters who grow their own food and manufacture their own weapons while running coops to generate their own income?

    The reason that people like you ‘Joe’ find it hard to support Syrians or Libyans in their fights for political freedom is that you are fantasy revolutionaries. By that, I mean that you fantasize about the replacement of governments closer to home but your own revolutionary efforts advance no further than the occasional online rant. So, embarrassed by your own political apathy and impotence, you seek a vicarious experience of power by aligning yourself with symbolic anti-imperialists like those in Iran or Venezuela. You can’t align yourself with those who fight your enemy’s enemy — irrespective of the political legitimacy of that fight. Moreover, you’d rather look at the world through the prism of supposedly indomitable forces such as US imperialism, the West, and Zionism, because the mightier these powers appear, the easier it is to reconcile yourself with the assumption that individually you can do nothing to change the world.

    As for what the eventual outcome will be in Syria, I have no clearer view into the future than anyone else. However, I don’t subscribe to the view implicitly held by some on the left that if a dictatorship cannot be peacefully overthrown then one should resign oneself to remaining under its control.

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