Echoes of Destruction in Syria
The decades that follow war often extend the legacy of collapse and regression.
Remember when Syria was in the news incessantly? The MSM (Main Stream Media) was practically begging Americans to support another war. The support never came and so strategic adjustments for taking an active role were made out of the public eye. Politicians would promote war on the one hand and would vow “no American boots on the ground” on the other [a lie that I have first hand knowledge of… story for another post someday]. Soon there would be a new administration with a different Syria agenda and in a short time, we stopped hearing about the country in the MSM.
The problem is, the world is a much smaller place and what is done by one or more nation’s leaders has consequences that last over time. [This of course applies to not only Syria, but other areas of conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan as well.] What can we do to actively bring about positive developments in war-torn regions like Syria?
I retrieved the below statistics from the UNICEF article “Syria conflict 10 years on: 90 per cent of children need support as violence, economic crisis and COVID-19 pandemic push families to the brink.” I will be interspersing my comments after the bullet points.
A decade of conflict has had a staggering impact on children and families in Syria:
In the last year, the price of the average food basket increased by over 230 per cent;
War shatters the basic foundation of economic viability of a country. Roads, fuel, transportation, safety, production of goods and scarcity all play into the
More than half a million children under the age of five in Syria suffer from stunting as a result of chronic malnutrition;
This is a public health catastrophe, especially from a life course perspective. The unfavorable conditions persisting today will result in major pathologies in the coming years for this generation.
Nearly 2.45 million children in Syria and an additional 750,000 Syrian children in neighbouring countries are out of school; 40 per cent of them are girls;
Every year a child falls behind in school is a compounding setback that stunts or at best delays development (imagine the challenges facing Syria in a decade as a result). They will however be learning something—survival skills like foraging for food and water, child labor, or even crime.
According to verified data, between 2011 and 2020:
Almost 12,000 children were killed or injured;
Lord have mercy. +
More than 5,700 children – some as young as seven years old – were recruited into the fighting;
Youth and innocence is taken from these children and they are being introduced to normalized trauma and trauma infliction. There have been interesting longitudinal studies done on child soldiers and those initiated into crime organizations that follow their pathologies into adulthood.
More than 1,300 education and medical facilities and personnel have come under attack;
This is one of the things that does not get a lot of press but one with which I am very familiar. What attacks on these professions do is not only harm or threaten educators and medical professionals, but these attacks lead to flight and the so-called “brain drain” effect. In such a circumstance, the educated members at the top of a society’s operative side depart the country, leaving a gap in competence and decreased availability for access to those in these professions.
The reported numbers of children displaying symptoms of psychosocial distress doubled in 2020, as continued exposure to violence, shock and trauma has had a significant impact on children’s mental health, with short and long-term implications.
We have seen the way that the genocides of the early 1900s and World War II impacted the lives of not only the survivors, but their descendants as well. What we’re witnessing now will lead to generational trauma that will have negative public health outcomes for the foreseeable future—most of these are not even measured in concert with the war-time causes impacting their ancestors. The Armenian communities in diaspora are an interesting case study in this regard.
What can we do when the world has gone silent on Syria and we have our own problems to deal with? I don’t have a direct answer for this, but I do think that it is important to persist in our knowledge of these locations and the situations that were briefly made important for us, not letting them eclipse into a forgotten past. At the very least, by maintaining a memory and active discourse about places like Syria, we will eventually show our policy makers (I know most don’t care, even when they fein sympathy) that these issues need to be dealt with on both a humanitarian scale (for the purpose of the people whose lives our policy makers have impacted) as well as our own self-interest in seeing a world in mutual prosperity instead of sewing the seeds of future chaos.