To assess the severity of a conflict, we often stop at the number of victims. The one in Syria has now reached the sixth year and has already over half a million dead. That it is the bloodiest on the planet is "peaceful".
What is often not taken into account, however, is the number of wounded and mutilated that will bring in the body and soul the indelible signs of this war that is absurd and unjust. Let's talk about impressive figures.
For the past four years, these signs have brought them into a former Syrian army officer. His name is Fadi, enlisted in 2008 for love of his country, as he himself sets out to clarify.
He is sitting in front of us. It is not the classic plaintive and defeated invalid. It is a lion to which they have broken their backs but who observe us with pride and dignity such as to put us in awe; Fadi speaks in a low voice and a gentle tone and often indulges in a smile.
His body is a bundle of pain. To mitigate it must wear a bust and a shoulder strap.
Scars that look like canyons run along the chest and hips. The other impairments, which for anyone would be serious, seem nothing in the general context.
Twenty-four operations in four years did not serve to restore a normality that he will never find again. It will still have to support four others.
9 December 2009. Colleated Syrians staged street demonstrations trying to involve defenseless citizens; "Moderate and democratic rebels" (as some people still today call them!) They snot people in the street or in front of the army garrisons to put tares and blame the military. Religious agitators come from outside with the support of Western countries (even Italy has its share of responsibility!) And the situation becomes chaotic. To multiply the number of victims and get rid of the Syrian soldiers that disturb the slaughter, we move on to the mortars from 120. The dead and the wounded increase exponentially.
Fadi heads 30 men sent to Harasta (north-eastern outskirts of Damascus) to protect military garrisons and fleeing citizens. Some of his soldiers are hit by an explosion. They are excited moments: the doctor does not arrive and, in order to better patch up the bloodstains, they soon end up bandages. They are dying and come out into the open: they must find first aid material and try to save them. He runs until he meets another soldier. He manages to address a single sentence, then the soldier who is about to answer him is literally torn by a mortar shell from 120. Fadi is hurled fifteen meters away.
The man in front of us remembers every moment. He says he never lost consciousness.
He recounts that he had collected the fingers of the hand sheared by the splinters on the ground and walked disembowelled and covered with blood until he reached other soldiers who took him to the hospital. In the following two weeks he underwent 14 interventions.
For 25 days the attacks are continuous and everywhere. All hospitals are full and are being stormed by the rebels.
Today there is so much clamor for the bombs that beat on civilian targets. Without even confirmation, one agitates for every death, for every cry, for every tear that bathes the rubble of famous cities like Aleppo.
Soldiers like Fadi were the main victims of that "double standard"with which the international media treated the Syrian crisis.
Invisible people, often unjustly portrayed as "massacres of their own people", but who instead bear in their body and mind the signs of one of the most absurd and bloody conflicts in recent history.
Fadi's tone of voice, his calmness, dramatically increase our sense of guilt towards men defamed to the point of passing from the role of victims to that of executioners.
Today's news is apparently witnessing the complicit role of the Western media in portraying the jiihadist rebels as "heroes" and as "murderers" those who have fought for years to oppose their advance, then remain silent on the complicity of Western governments, or allied to them (read the Gulf states), in fueling their firepower, media and economic.
For years, however, the Syrian people were deliberately massacred without a finger moving in the West: not a word, not an article, not a gesture of disdain. Model hospitals throughout the Middle East (Syria was famous for its structures) were stormed according to programmed incivility, designed to create and multiply pain. After the echo of the mortars, there was only the silence of a guilty hypocrisy.
"I remember that people just operated, due to lack of space, ended up in the corridors. The same from which the soldiers fired to defend the structure from attacks. It was chaos.
I'm still alive because between me and the bomb there was the body of that colleague".
There is no day (and night!) That does not return to Fadi's mind that event.
It is hard to believe that it could have survived the caliber of that shell. However, the wounds on the meat that shows us have a very clear signature ...
All the money received for the discharge, a few thousand euros, was spent on surgical operations. Today he survives on a pension of 55 euros a month with his mother and a brother, who is also disabled.
He is only thirty years old. He can hardly raise a family, have children, or even just find a job.
Giorgio, our photojournalist, asks if knowing how it went, today he would enlist again.
"Of course I would do it again. Despite my conditions are still alive, many others have lost their lives in those days. Thanks to our sacrifice we have saved at least 500 civilians in the assigned area".
Without bust and swaddling bands, excruciating pains pass through him in a few minutes. We realize this when we ask to photograph it: a few minutes of tolerance and then an authentic agony.
We ask him to look at the goal as if he were facing his executioners.
Despite the impairments Fadi is a lion. The trembling fingers of the left hand try to highlight the middle finger ...
Text: Andrea Cucco, Giampiero Venturi, Giorgio Bianchi
Photo: Giorgio Bianchi
