Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin:

Aleppo mattered, it should go without saying, but it’s worthwhile enumerating what did not matter. You can start with Aleppo’s 31,000 dead and proceed from there through each and every statutory war crime codified by the International Criminal Court.

Mass murder by chlorine gas. Massacres of innocents. Bombardments by Russian jet fighters. The deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics. The firing of mortar rounds into crowded neighbourhoods. The terror of barrel bombs dropped from Syrian army helicopters. The starvation siege that followed the city’s encirclement by Shia death squads and Assadist militias on Sept. 8.

None of that mattered, not the hourly imagery on Instagram and Youtube and Twitter of corpse-strewn streets and decapitated infants, and not the gut-wrenching final goodbyes uploaded to mobile phones or sent by text from the survivors in the rebel-held ruins of the Old City, the al-Shaar district, and the backstreets of Sheikh Saeed.

Leaning against a wall, his tattered Adidas hoodie drawn against the rain, the young English teacher, reporter and activist Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo managed to use his cellphone camera to upload his goodbye to the video-streaming service Periscope on Monday night.

“What I want to say is, don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community. Don’t think that they are not satisfied with what’s going on. They are satisfied that we are being killed, that we are facing one of the most difficult, or the most serious, or the most horrible massacres that is in our history.

“Russia doesn’t want us to go out alive. They want us dead. Assad is the same … but at least we know that we were a free people. We wanted freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t like freedom, it seems.”

There is no plausible defence any of us can mount against Al-Hambdo’s plain-spoken indictment. In the world’s citadels of democracy, there are no popular constituencies sufficient to the task of commanding our elected leaders to put their backs into the emancipation of the Syrian people from their tormentors. After all, you know, quagmire and all that. Broach the subject of NATO enforcing a modicum of order in the Syrian abattoir by means of, say, a no-fly zone, and you’ll be denounced as a warmonger in the mould of the arch-villains George W. Bush and Tony Blair. 

The truth of it is we’d just rather not take the trouble…

You can see Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo's "last call from Aleppo" here.