NP: Syria, part 4

[jody2.718]

That’s a good point you raise also about it occurring in the context of the civil war, that people might see it differently.

Well, that they’re like martyrs for the cause. Just like anybody else.

How does the group that you’re quoting, especially at the beginning of the story, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, compile these astonishingly bleak figures?

The reason that they are considered the most rigorous and reliably conservative numbers, which are used by many U.N. agencies and governments and human-rights organizations, is that their numbers are not extrapolations or estimates. Their numbers are actual counts of reports that they get. They have people on the ground and people outside Syria, and they basically just take phone calls, and they also have a form on their Web site that you can fill in. They go through the detailed report to them, they verify what they can, and they take this actual tally. A death has to be reported by a family member or direct witness. They don’t take third-party accounts. They even have a guy who goes back and calls the people who have been listed as possible family members of people who have been listed as missing for a long time, to find out if they’re still missing or not. The guy who runs the place told me that they all need therapy, because all they do is take these reports from these family members and contact all these family members. All the people in his organization, like all the Syrians who are working on this and journalists—it piles up to be a large load of trauma and despair.

You mentioned that, especially earlier in the war, there was more of a focus on things like barrel bombs. I do not mean this as a criticism at all of any of the incredible ISIS reporting that a lot of people have done, but do you ever think that the obsessive focus on ISIS and its brutality, including from the American government, warped people’s idea of what was going on in Syria, and which side was committing the most atrocities?

Yes. ISIS and Assad both, in their own ways, played on the tendency of people in the West to be disproportionately terrified by Islamist terrorism, which is partly a phenomenon of Islamophobia and partly the over-weighting of terrorism that everybody does, because it’s such a sensational type of event. ISIS wanted its attacks to be publicized, and they did it on purpose, to terrify people and to expand their reach through psychological terror. Assad very specifically wanted to show the world that he was fighting terrorists and jihadists, whereas, in fact, his government is using all the machinery of the state, and the numbers of people that they are killing and arresting is much, much higher than the numbers that were harmed by ISIS, as terrible and criminal as ISIS’s acts were.

(Continued)

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