The recent chemical weapon attacks in Syria sent shockwaves throughout the world and have led to international outrage. The Baathist regime in Syria led by Bashar Al Assad has demonstrated throughout the country’s six-year war that it is ready to stoop to any level to crush their foes. Even then the manner in which the country’s military turned a rebel-held area into a toxic kill zone shows that the Syrian government has sunk to a new low. Dozens of people, including children, died — some writhing, choking, gasping or foaming at the mouth — after breathing in poison that contained banned and dangerous chemicals. The Syrian military has denied responsibility and has held the rebels responsible. However, that statement has to be taken with a handful of salt as the state army only has the ability and motive to carry out such an attack. The scale and brazenness of the assault threatened to further subvert a nominal and often violated cease-fire that had taken hold in parts of the country since Syrian forces retook the city of Aleppo.
The United States in a show of decisive punitive action fired as many as 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syrian territory ignoring the fact that Russia would strongly react to it. Rather naturally most Western countries have supported the US action. However, what was rather unexpected was the wholehearted support from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to the US action. Off course it is easy to say that any other country–whether a superpower or not–does not have the right to intervene in another country’s ‘internal’ affairs.
However as the saying goes desperate times call for desperate measures. The situation in Syria is a desperate one by any definition of the term and the world must come together–with the United Nations showing the way– to find a solution to the great human crisis in that country once and for all. In many post civil war situations the solution has been for an outside country or organization, such as the United Nations, to send peacekeepers.
All wars have their share of brutality and inhumanity but the sheer savageness seen in the ongoing civil war in Syria is surely one of the worst in modern history. All the sides involved in the war have often crossed all limits of civilized behaviour. They seem to have forgotten that in the contemporary world everything is “not” justified in war. The world has the United Nations and the Geneva Convention which strictly defines what is permitted in wartime.