Eva
Bartlett breaks down the dizzying array of information surrounding
the mounting humanitarian crisis in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta. With
accusations abound, parsing the reality on the ground is becoming
more challenging by the day.
by
Eva Bartlett
Part
3 - Like corporate media, UN whitewashes al-Qaeda and co-extremists
The UN’s
Lowcock humanized the suffering in eastern Ghouta, and it cannot be
denied there is suffering there, where the aforementioned terrorist
groups embed in civilian areas only to hold civilians hostage, and
are the cause of the military siege and targeted strikes on Ghouta.
Yet, he
and the media mentioned only in passing, and skeptically, the
relentless shelling of civilian areas of Damascus and the surrounding
countryside, dehumanizing the civilians of Damascus — just as
corporate media dehumanized the civilians of Aleppo, then under the
relentless bombings and sniping of al-Qaeda and other terrorists’
occupying the city’s eastern areas.
In
Aleppo in November 2016, the head of forensics, Dr. Zaher Hajjo, told
me (on a day of intense terrorist bombings that killed 18 civilians
and injured over 200) that in the past five years 10,750 civilians
had been killed in Aleppo, 40 percent of whom were women and
children. He said that in the past year alone, 328 children had been
killed by terrorist shelling in Aleppo, 45 children killed by
terrorist snipers.
In April
2014, I visited the French Hospital in Damascus, which was treating
some of the over 60 children who had been injured by terrorists’
shelling of their school, which also killed one child. Also at the
hospital was the BBC’s correspondent, Lyse Doucet. While she
promised to give an honest account of the targeting of these
children, her report instead read: “They’re believed to be
fired by rebels, but the government is also accused of launching them
into neighborhoods under its control. So brutal is this war that
nothing is considered unthinkable…”
In
February 2015, I visited Damascus’ University Hospital, documenting
just some of the children maimed and critically injured by such
terrorist attacks — and, a year prior wrote about my own
experiences in the intense shelling of Damascus, where I stayed
several weeks — and, since then, have met victims of terrorist
shelling of Old Damascus.
With
access to numerous sources on these incessant and deadly mortar and
rocket attacks and the Syrian ambassador’s repeated statements on
this at the UN, the United Nations nevertheless chooses to obfuscate
on the intensified shelling of civilian areas of Damascus and
elsewhere in Syria, and instead endorse the war propagandists.
On
February 22, UNICEF tweeted a New York Times article featuring “media
activist” Firas Abdullah. Abdullah is not the neutral media source
portrayed. Following the December 2015 killing of terrorist Zahran
Alloush, then-leader of Jaysh al-Islam, Abdullah posted his eulogy
for Alloush, calling him a “beautiful martyr.” This is the person
whom the Times chose to portray a human face of Ghouta, retweeted by
UNICEF.
Also on
February 22, the UN body tweeted a CNN report citing the SOHR, and of
course the UNICEF blank statement of outrage, in the cyclic fashion
that is typical of regime-change war propaganda reinforcing itself.
On
February 21, UNICEF tweeted a Newsweek photo slideshow titled after
UNICEF’s own blank statement of outrage.
The
February 20 tweet of the blank UNICEF statement included
#EasternGhouta, but no hashtag for Damascus. Surely an oversight…
Their
February 19 tweet links to an article on the Bana al-Abed of Ghouta,
Muhammad Najem, whose Twitter account began in December 2017 and has
nearly 5,000 followers. Expect that number to skyrocket. Expect a
memoir to follow.
A UNICEF
February 19 tweet on Ghouta links to war propagandist Louisa
Loveluck’s article, reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
If it
isn’t already clear, UNICEF is participating in war propaganda
against Syria, reporting and endorsing one very exaggerated and not
substantiated side of the story, disappearing another very real side.
This is
not the first time the UN has covered up terrorists’ crimes against
Syrian civilians. In October 2016, I wrote of UNICEF’s unproven
claims of an aerial attack on an Idlib school, in which UNICEF
decried it as possibly “the deadliest attack on a school since
the war began more than five years ago.” As I reported, UNICEF
overlooked numerous documented deadly attacks on schools: “On
October 1, 2014, terrorists’ car- and suicide-bombed the Akrama
Al-Makhzoumi School in Homs, killing at least 41 children by
conservative estimates, or up to 48 children by other reports, along
with women and other civilians.”
I
further noted: “On October 28, 2016, RT reporter Murad Gazdiev
reported from Aleppo on the latest attacks by Western-backed
terrorists on a school in the city. At the time of the report, at
least six children were reported killed by a Hell Cannon-fired gas
canister bomb which struck a school in Ḩadaiq al-Andalus. From an
Aleppo hospital, Gazdiev reported: ‘The rebels launched the rocket
at 10 in the morning. Seconds later it hit the National School of
Aleppo… Three of the children died on the spot…. blood and pieces
of them sprayed on the walls. The victims, six children, ranged in
age from 2 to 12. In some cases, doctors weren’t sure if they’d
put the right body parts with the correct bodies. Three of the dead
children were siblings: two brothers and a sister. Their father was
beyond consolation. His mental stability had been torn apart.’ This
statement was given over footage of a devastated father kissing the
corpses of his children.”
In
January 2016, I wrote of OCHA’s selective tweeting around the
terrorist-occupied village of Madaya, obfuscating the
terrorist-besieged Idlib villages of Foua and Kafraya.
Honest
reporters like Murad Gazdiev entered Madaya in January 2016 and
confirmed that food and medical aid had indeed entered. He spoke with
residents who complained of the armed groups stealing this food.
When I
went to Madaya in June 2017, I spoke with civilians there who stated
that vast amounts of food and medical aid entered the area, but they
had no access to it, as Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra and co-extremists
holding the village hoarded the food and sold it at extortionist
prices. I also saw prisons use to hold, and sometimes torture,
civilians before their trials in terrorists’ courts. I also saw
these in eastern Aleppo and in al-Layramoun, in the city’s
northwest. When eastern Ghouta is finally secured, it won’t be
surprising to learn that schools, hospitals, and/or homes were turned
into prisons to hold the civilians for whom the UN and corporate
media feign concern.
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