The optics triggered by Bashar al-Assad's chemical strike against civilians in Khan Sheikhoun, resulting in close to 90 casualties, including women, children and babies, prompted a response which is still reverberating in several national capitals. President Trump's decision to send 59 missiles into the airfield from which the Syrian government's planes took off for the attack has been revered by many, regretted by some, and condemned by a number of governments involved in the Syrian civil war which is now in its sixth year.
Mr.Trump proclaimed that the sarin gas attack was an "affront to humanity," which affected him profoundly and transformed his thinking about the Syrian president, and led him to order the missile attack. Skeptics believe that Barack Obama's failure to enforce a "red line" over Assad's use of chemical weapons provided a powerful impetus to show that there was "a new sheriff in town." But even if, for the sake of argument, we take the comments surrounding this military event at face value, some of the questions we should ask, especially as they relate to the millions of children that have become the victims of warfare, are: Where was the outrage when barrel bombs rained down on hospitals, market places and other civilian targets? And, while in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries roughly half of all deaths in conflict zones were civilian, by the end of the 20th century almost 90 percent have been civilian, many of them children. What changed to make these more vulnerable today?
Warfare has changed, and these changes include the identity of combatants and the relative vulnerability of civilian populations. Most early wars were wars of aggression, generally for conquest or subjugation. The conquests by Alexander the Great and Gaius Julius Ceasar and others were well documented, and mostly military "events." The religious conflicts, from the crusades of the 11th through the 13th centuries, the wars of religion during the 16th and 17th century, the Napoleonic wars, and even World War I, were also essentially dominated by competing military forces, only incidentally affecting civilian populations. World War II produced a shift when the Nazis eventually combined conquest with ethnic cleansing, which, by its nature involved significant numbers of vulnerable children.
As wars evolved from predominantly interstate conflicts - fought between two or more states, - to intra-state armed conflicts, civil conflicts between a government and a non-state group, which largely takes place within the territory of the state in question, the incidence of civilian casualties increased dramatically. These conflict are as likely to be fought in villages and on suburban streets as anywhere else. The enemy camp is all around, and distinctions between combatants and no-combatants melt away in the suspicions and confusions of daily strife. Casualties are often not random. Where civil wars resulted from an ethnic conflict between two or more groups fighting for their ethnic group's position in society, children have often been targeted for "preventative" reasons.
Although the Nazi experience could not be identified as an ethnic conflict per-se, Hitler's enforcers unquestionably practiced ethnic cleansing. They openly, for political purposes, scapegoated various ethnic groups, and advocated killing children of "unwanted" or "dangerous" groups, either as part of the "racial struggle" or as a measure of preventative security. During a five-year period they killed as many as 1.5 million children, including over 1 million Jewish children and tens of thousands gypsy children and children with physical or mental disabilities. (Holocaust Encyclopedia - U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum).
In previous centuries children sometimes ended up in the cross-fire. In contemporary conflicts they have often become targets. Today one billion children are living in countries and territories affected by war or conflict. It is fair to conclude that large numbers suffer violent injuries and death. In Afghanistan, since 1979, at least 35,000 children have been victims of land mines alone (U.N. reports). As of 2015, the estimated civilian death toll in Afghanistan was 26,000. Iraq counted 120,000 since 2003. Well over 50 percent are children. After six years of civil war in Syria, the death count stands at 470,000 - 55,000 of these are children. ("I Am Syria," February, 2017). As early as 1996, UNICEF reported that during the preceding decade 2 million children were killed; 4.5 million disabled; 12 million left homeless; more than 1 million orphaned or separated from their parents; and some 10 million psychologically traumatized. ("The State of the World's Children." UNICEF, 1996). This was well before the Syrian civil war and myriad other conflicts broke out.
Whereas the optics of vulnerable children dying while foaming at their mouths might signify that a "red line" was crossed, justifying an international response, these "red lines" are set way too high. Barrel bombs dropped on civilian targets have produced significantly more carnage. Still, government forces are getting away with these criminal acts by hiding behind the concept of "national sovereignty" and blaming "terrorists."
This should be enough to force the international community to pull its collective head out of the sand, increase the visibility of these atrocities, and begin to hold governments and institutions perpetrating these acts accountable. National sovereignty be damned.
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