AI: Divided town of Deir Ezzour is a microcosm of Syria’s bitter conflict

[pampango]

Once a thriving hub of Syria’s oil industry, today Deir Ezzour has become a bleak microcosm of the Syrian conflict.

Few outsiders make it to this isolated corner of Syria. No human rights organizations and only a handful of journalists have visited the town. The opposition-controlled section of the town is the only area I can access as the Syrian government has banned Amnesty International and other human rights organizations from areas of the country under its command. The streets are eerily quiet and much of the town is in ruin. Many of the residents have fled. The empty shells of burned and bombed-out buildings line the streets – a testament to the unrelenting air strikes, artillery, mortar and tank shelling by President Bashar al-Assad’s troops.

Rockets and shells pound the city day and night, smashing into residential buildings or landing in the streets. For the civilians left in town there is little they can do to keep safe. The nights are punctuated by the thumping sound of incoming artillery and occasionally the sound of outgoing mortars fired by the armed opposition groups reverberates across the town. Everywhere, fragments of the Grad rockets fired by government forces from a hill overlooking the town litter the ground.

Even the town’s medical facilities have not been spared. Field hospitals are set up in secret locations, to protect them from attacks by government forces. During a visit to one small and under-resourced hospital, I meet Ahmad, a 30-year-old father of three young children who is paralyzed from the waist down.

This is why the inaction of the international community is all the more reprehensible. Had world leaders had the political will to overcome their divisions and put pressure on the parties involved in this conflict earlier on to resolve the crisis, many thousands of lives could have been saved. The crisis in Syria has deteriorated so far that it is today infinitely more difficult to address. But looking the other way is not the solution. A referral of the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council would send a powerful message to those committing war crimes on all sides of the conflict, government and opposition alike. Perhaps a realistic prospect of being held accountable for their crimes could make many choose a different course of action.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/divided-town-deir-ezzour-microcosm-syria-s-bitter-conflict-2013-09-12

Interesting that Amnesty International can still get people into certain parts of the country.

If the Security Council could, at least, refer Syria to the ICC, then all sides that perpetrate war crimes would be on notice that there may be some accounting, some day.