by Marco Lupis
As always, the first victim, in war, is the truth. It does not matter who said it (many have said it and repeated it) it matters that – unfortunately – once again it is true. In the Syrian cauldron, the warning level has long since been overcome, but it is in these last hours that the future of the area will be decided, and perhaps that of the whole world. The US cruiser Donal Coock, armed with Tomahawk missiles, is ready in front of the Syrian coast. The Russian fighters fly at low altitude while the French frigate Aquitaine has joined the American assault group. The Chinese warships in the Mediterranean have been ordered to join the Russian navy in the event of an imminent attack in Syria. And the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has also issued an alert on civilian air routes in the eastern Mediterranean. The scenario is potentially apocalyptic and Trump insists: “The Russians should not be allies of a killer animal that murder his own people with gas and has fun!”
And as in a script already played, in a script already recited, once again, like in the days of Iraq, would be the indiscriminate and certainly unacceptable use of chemical weapons, put in place by Assad against unarmed civilians, to justify the outbreak of the umpteenth conflict. With unpredictable consequences. And once again the war is first of all a war of lies, of misdirections, of real accusations impossible to distinguish from lies. In the Syrian chaos the few truths are now indistinguishable from the avalanche of lies manufactured and used by all the contending parties in order to justify their work.
The West attributes to Assad the chemical attack that would have occurred in Douma, near Eastern Ghouta, while the Russian sites relaunch the statements of the Syrian Red Cross, which says it has not found traces of gas at Douma. And strangely, very strangely, the jihadist gang of Jaysh al-Islam, funded and armed by Saudi Arabia, who controlled Douma, does not mention it, of these gases.
It reminds me of what I saw in Kosovo, in Racak, in January 1999, in front of that small mosque, the floor covered with corpses, remains of the forty-five Kosovo Albanians who were butchered a few days before. The blood-stained plastic sheets on which the corpses were lined up were still lying on the floor. Strewn around the place are a few of the old blankets and rags used to cover their faces and conceal the empty sockets in which their eyes used to sit. Other pieces of fabric were used to cover the slit throats of children or severed heads. A Serbian massacre, we now know with certainty. But even then, the war machine of lies was trying to mess up the papers and the Serbs absurdly claimed that those tortured bodies were not defenseless civilians, taken and massacred in their homes, but KLA fighters stripped of their uniforms after death and dressed in civilian clothing. And that the bullets in the back of their heads, just like the butchering of many of the victims’ heads and limbs, had been administered by the KLA afterwards in an act of propaganda aimed at bringing international disdain and condemnation upon the Serbs.
All falsehoods, all lies.
Yesterday like today, in Syria?
Marco Lupis 