For about three days from Syria there have been reports of bombings on civilian targets and consequent massacres against innocent men, women and children. The date coincides with the start of the massive offensive of the Syrian armed forces on the eastern districts of Aleppo, still in the hands of jihadist militias.
This is not the first time this has happened. Curiously, whenever loyalist forces are on the verge of shifting the balance on the ground, warnings of collateral damage from the war turn up the volume.
Let's see with order.
Since the 2012, when the ranks of rebels against the Damascus government grew in geometric progression and the central power seemed set on a rapid break-up, news began to circulate about massacres of civilians through the use of unconventional weapons. The information in this regard has always been one-way: "The loyalist forces, in open distress and frustrated by an imminent meltdown, resort to illicit weapons to make scorched earth and punish civilians conniving with the rebels".
The main diffuser of this information is, according to practice, theSyrian Human Rights Observatory, whose voice is bounced every day by the majority of Western media. As advocated several times by Online Defense, the Observatory is not one NGO whatever, but an enigmatic London-based organization that quickly became the only spokesperson heard in the West of Syrian war reports. Its leader, Rami Abdel Rhaman, is indicated by the Syrian government as an opposition activist, while unverified sources explicitly refer to collaborations with Western (British) services. The aim would be to discredit the government of Damascus in the eyes of the world public, acting perhaps in anticipation of a future international criminal judicial initiative against its prominent political figures.
In the 2013 the scandal of the barrels-bomb began to circulate, artisan bombs that the Syrian army would have made and following the best practices to reap as many victims as possible and at the same time save expensive conventional weapons. The bomb barrels are nothing more than petrol drums recycled as containers of explosives to which metals and tar would be added. Some of the tissue of "expert" human rights observers even talked about stems filled with white phosphorus. 
Just after the occupation of the jihadist militias of some neighborhoods of Aleppo, the rumor of an indiscriminate use of these weapons in the occupied areas by the Syrians has become a torment, good for reportage tears tears whose curtain of pain is amplified according to the clichés Manichean of propaganda: the bad guys throw the bombs; the good guys are here to get them.
Let's clarify some points. None of the news of civilian massacres reported in 5 years of war in Syria has ever been accompanied by independent confirmations on the ground that could attest to consistency and responsibility. Just to give an example, we have counted 15 reports of hospital bombings since the beginning of 2016:
- in 14 opportunities have been assigned without hesitation to air raids or Russian-Syrian artillery shootings;
- on all occasions the complaints started fromSyrian Human Rights Observatory or from SAMS, Syrian American Medical Society, a Washington-based association of doctors operating in Syria from the 2011;
- however, no reliable evidence was provided on the human and material damage caused by the bombing, nor on their paternity.
For three days we have been limited to saying that the bombs continue to fall and we are competing against those who shoot the highest number of dead children.
Beyond the actual relief (the dead are dead and there is little to be ironic) it is good to use a little common sense to understand better. Let's limit ourselves to the metropolitan area of Aleppo, where the most frequent civilian massacres alarms have been concentrated and let's consider 3 points:
- urban war involves the inevitable involvement of civilians. It is the war itself that is horrible, not its consequences. A war fought between the houses, inevitably has even more dramatic unwanted impacts. Alternating current moralism is of little use;
- the militiamen of Free Syrian Army, di Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (Eg Al Nusra) and other pro-Turkish jihadist gangs that control the eastern districts of Aleppo are no more than 4-5000, compared to hundreds of thousands of civilians in the occupied area. The slowness with which the Syrian Armed Forces have so far proceeded to clean up the city is mainly dictated by the need to avoid bloodshed among the population systematically held hostage as a human shield by the militiamen. The popularity of the Damascus government has grown considerably in the last two years, since the jihad was monopolized by foreign guerrillas. What is presented by the media as a civil war between factions for and against Assad is in reality a war fought by a sovereign state against heterodirect militias flanked by the inevitable internal supporters. The parable of the Free Syrian Army, natural outlet for tens of thousands of defectors in the first months of the war, then strongly reduced as organic and as importance as the fate of the war changed;
3. Regarding the indiscriminate use of so-called barrel bombs by the loyalist forces, the network is clogged with technical articles that ridicule the possible use by an institutional armed force of a similar device. No need to add more.
Propaganda or news does not matter. We have already spoken of the distortion of information on the war in Syria. The important fact is that people continue to speculate about the death and suffering of thousands of people. This until proven otherwise, seems the only objective fact.
(photo: SAA)
