Emancipation Russian-style: this photo is Douma, a neighborhood of Damascus, after a Syrian airstrike yesterday. We don’t even want to imagine what it’s like for this little boy to live with war & bombing trauma for most of his life. It’s called growing up in Armageddon.
There’s been a lot of drama about the Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov which launches bombers & attack helicopters & its flotilla of warships & submarines now positioned off the coast of Syria. Assad supporters have been reporting their impatience & enthusiasm for when Russia will start launching bombers off the carrier & resume operations against the “throat-cutting jihadists” in Aleppo, Douma, & other cities with tens of thousands of civilians.
Today the Russian defense minister announced their air force has launched a major operation off the carrier in the Syrian provinces of Idlib & Homs targeting ammunition depots, training camps, & armaments factories.
The defense minister didn’t mention the resumption of Russian airstrikes over rebel-held east Aleppo where 250,000 civilians live & which were reported by Syrian activists.
Some antiwar activists object (fewer of them protest) when US warplanes claim they’re emancipating civilians by bombing them to smithereens–like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya. But they consider Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians to be the real deal of freedom fighting. How have politics degenerated so badly on fundamental principles?
Principled antiwar activists are opposed to bombing civilians to death & accept no compromise on that. The only principled antiwar demands to rebuild the international antiwar movement around are: the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces in Syria, overt & covert, paramilitary, mercenaries, on land, air, & by sea. Out now!
(Photo by Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)