The horror that is Syria today

Did you see Channel 4 news last night? They devoted the bulk of the programme to a film made by a German photojournalist who has been living in Aleppo for the past few months and has chronicled in horrific detail exactly what has been going on there.

What his film demonstrated was just how massive the war has become: affecting the lives of everyone, which ever side they may support. The film focused on a couple of children who had decided to help out in the makeshift hospital, hopelessly under-equipped and overloaded with casualties of the dreadful conflict. These children, only 12 years old but grown old before their time, applied dressings to the wounded; sometimes, as doctors and nurses have done throughout history when they have nothing physical to offer their charges, simply offered support and love. Then one of these children is hit by piece of shrapnel and brought, dying, to the very hospital he has worked in over the previous months of carnage.

There have been other terrible conflicts in Syria in the reign of the Assads. In 1982 perhaps as many as 20,000 people died in Homs when the Muslim Brotherhood rose up. But even that figure is nothing to the perhaps 250,000 souls who have been lost in the current fighting. And perhaps most ominously, on the ground in places like Aleppo, it is not the regime or even the opposition that is helping ordinary people on the street with food, clothing and other essentials, but the hard-line, Sharia promoting Islamists, who, understandably, are enjoying increasing support from the population. What this means for the future of Syria, and indeed the Middle East as a whole can only be guessed at, but we can be sure it marks an extremely worrying development- for everyone in the West certainly.