This is a strange morning in Damascus. Artillery shots starting (sometimes arriving ...) to areas still under rebel control are the background even today in the Syrian capital.
Students with backpacks of spiderman they dangle towards school, while shopkeepers slowly reopen shutters of activity that the war has reduced to a minimum.
It seems like the beginning of a day like the others, but today's one will go to History: Trump, against all odds, will be the next president of the United States.
The election, if only half of the considerations made on the foreign policy of the last eight years will be confirmed, will lead to a change of course. How wide it will be, it is still difficult to say, but it will happen.
Certainly the exacerbation of open support for the "democratic" rebel forces and the "accidental" resistance to those of the Caliphate has been avoided.
In Syria, a war built on the ground and distorted in the world media has already cost half a million deaths. Genocide.
A senseless and criminal massacre intended to prolong an agony, not to win the war.
The conflict is in its sixth year. In this period of time, the propaganda machine of the Syrian government's opponents has done more damage than the blades of cutthroats sent here from Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, Chechnya, Tunisia, and almost 100 nations for "Freeing Syria from a dictatorship".
The real fault of Syrian President Assad is to be in charge of a nation that is difficult to define democratic (it would be difficult even for a North Korean ...), but not to be a "dictator" at the same time.
If there were still the father, as happened in the past, the accounts would have been liquidated in a few months and a few tens of thousands of deaths. A crime certainly, but that at the cost of individual responsibility would have saved 500.000 lives.
What should the good Bashar do now?
Surely take the initiative: avoid suffering a new campaign of misinformation and displace the enemy with reforms that do justice to too many Syrian families who have seen at least one relative fall because of the war.
Pay attention in areas that have turned out to be a boomerang. Information for example. Six years ago, state television was not considered reliable by anyone and satellite dishes peeped over every roof of the country in search of reliable sources.
Those same "Reliable sources" they betrayed the Syrians. Now above the roofs of each house there is only a cemetery of rusty parables. When truth is served, the government has been a victim of itself, confusing information with propaganda until it finds itself in the hands of a discharged weapon. Weapon well used by the rich and influential enemies of every level and every country ... Admit the error and strive to not repeat it, to understand that it is better to have reliable information (even when critical), could make a people regain their strength exhausted after years of lies and tears.
Let's face it without hesitation: in six years of war, Syrian propaganda has never lived up to that of the West.
For years the soldiers of Damascus have appeared to international public opinion as executioners, murderers of their own people; the rebel militias viceversa, with the complicity of the media all over the world, have been painted as a symbol of democracy aimed at freeing an entire country from the yoke of the dictatorship.
L'embedding photographers and journalists in the ranks of the so-called "democratic rebels" turned the armed opponents to Assad in heroes, celebrated for their deeds against an absolute and bloody regime.
On the other hand, nothing came, no one who could tell the story of men and boys, who often volunteered, dressed the uniform of their army, for the sole purpose of defending their land, their homes and integrity national; men from the proletarian background, poor, often very poor, killed, wounded, mutilated and then end up branded for life by the stamp of infamy.
The war of these soldiers was silent, burdened by the burden of global disregard and conducted with inadequate means and strategies.
It is not surprising then the significant number of victims, but above all the anger towards that West that previously dragged thousands of innocent individuals onto the field and then dishonored them.
Now that the Russian intervention has reversed the fate of the conflict and that the victory on the field seems next, the media battle is still open, which wants a different treatment between those who fight ISIS in Iraq and those who fight in Syria.
With it remains the moral obligation to rebalance the terrible social disparities created by the war. The hundreds of thousands of people defeated by suffering, grief and grief are waiting for someone to tell their lives.
Another grenade falls into the distance. One day that will pass to history, for Damascus it is a day like any other.
text: Andrea Cucco, Giorgio Bianchi, Giampiero Venturi
photo: Giorgio Bianchi
