Aleppo is burning right before our eyes

Bomb damage in rebel-held east Aleppo PHOTO: COURTESY

Many of us love a good horror film. We like getting really afraid. Our hearts jump out of our chests and we squirm in our seats. We enjoy it because it is not real. We can escape at any time. At any point, we can say enough is enough. But imagine for a moment that your life was a real time horror movie.

That you were not watching a character on screen, but playing the actual part of a human being caught up in the most horrific circumstances.

Every day, the women and children of Aleppo - including newborn babies still in incubators – experience a reality of sheer terror. In the films, characters can share their apprehension and terror with each other, but in real life the children in Aleppo are horrified on their own,

People are dying in Aleppo and no one seems to care. I was reading the messages on Facebook and Twitter and could not face the suffering of the people.

How is it possible that 50,000 children have been killed in Syria? Is this what they mean by evacuation? As a lover of history, witnessing Aleppo - one of the most historically relevant cities of this century - destroyed and forgotten is saddening. History will judge us for our indifference, Half of those left in Aleppo are children.

They are bearing the brunt of the world’s political games. The logic of war sometimes paints situations with broad strokes.
To paint an entire population as terrorists allows for mass violence, and allows onlookers to ignore the innocent.

Aleppo is happening because the world has turned a blind eye.
Killing families in their homes on the premise that they are militants is a mere prelude to genocide. Genocide against innocent men, women and children is an ominous sign that might is right and ignores democracy.

Children born post March 2011 in Syria do not know what life is like without war. This is their world. Yes, their world! And yet we all sit back and do nothing.

How have we looked on as shell-shocked children are exhumed from rubble and left writhing in bloody clothes on dirty hospital gurneys? How have we watched as children resort to reciting the Quran as their only form of anesthesia during surgery?

Maybe we don’t want to deal with it. Maybe we just don’t care.
In a world where information can fit in the palm of your hand, in this world of social media everything that has been happening in Aleppo has been happening in front of our eyes. But who is marching on the streets of Paris, London or Nairobi or waving banners in solidarity?

Who is wiping the bloody tears from children who have survived the type of trauma that most adults would struggle to overcome? Children who respond with the strength many of us can only aspire to possess?
 

When I see the citizens of the world under the banner of the United Nations crying hypocritical tears when they see a video of a man carrying his son drenched in blood, I am ashamed. Disgusted by world leaders who preach freedom and democracy but then stay silent while genocide happens.

Young children like seven-year-old Bana Alabed and her mother Fatimah, who tweeted about the horrors of living through the Syrian government’s assault on eastern Aleppo are the true heroes of the war.

They are warriors on a battlefield where there is nothing sweet or fitting in death. As Ernest Hemingway once said, Syria’s is a war where, “You will die for no good reason.”
We all know what comes next.

Human indifference to mass murder in real time is sickening. But someday sooner or later, war and death will knock on your doors too. Lest we forget, Rwanda, Somalia, Darfur, Armenia, Bosnia!

To paraphrase Hemingway, when the smoke clears and the dust settles, we must never forget that the ‘free world’ watched as Aleppo burned.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary or how justified, is not a crime. It is time we learned compassion and empathy. What happened in Aleppo will stain our conscience for years to come despite the fact that in all likelihood, it will go unpunished. Let’s use what we have witnessed in Aleppo to make sure that the same never happens in Kenya.