At least 110 people have been killed in a string of Syrian government air strikes on a marketplace in Douma, a rebel-held town near Damascus, activists said. At least 300 people were injured, with the death toll, most of them civilians, likely to rise as many of the wounded were in a serious condition, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday. The civil defence in Douma put the death toll at 100. Firas Abdullah, a local photographer in Douma, told Al Jazeera that the market was the main one in the town. The attack on the market is the second in a week. On Wednesday, air strikes on the area left at least 27 people killed. Estimates of the death toll since the start of the war range between 250,000 and 310,000. The war in Syria has become a humanitarian crisis, but given the complex dynamics of the opposing forces, it is not a war that has a quick or easy solution. The internal strife that led to Syria’s current political instability has been overshadowed by the external conflicts that are being played out in the war. Iran and Hezbollah are supporting the Assad regime, while Saudi Arabia is supporting the Sunni rebel groups. Syria is just one case of Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia’s battling for influence in the Muslim world. As the US and its allies continue to back rebels in the hope of ousting President Bashar al-Assad, Russia is supporting the embattled government, which is reminiscent of the Cold War. All of these world powers are providing military, logistical or financial support to the opposing sides of the Syrian war and the interests of the Syrian people are clearly not a priority for the world leaders who have been supporting one side or another. What began as a simple bilateral opposition between the Assad regime and the Free Syrian Army (initiated by seven military officials) has now evolved into a rapidly evolving and complex battlefield that is difficult to fathom, let alone control. The rise of Islamic State (IS), which was able to make use of Syria’s instability to capture more than one-third of the country, is an indirect consequence of Syria’s proxy wars. Despite the chaos that has ensued from the failed attempt of the Arab Spring to bring democracy to Syria, it seems that the west has still not learned the lesson that supporting proxies to intervene in the politics of sovereign states tends to have unintended consequences. Even now, the US is backing an unlikely alliance of Kurdish rebels and several Sunni Muslim militant groups in the fight against IS. One of these groups is the al Qaeda-affiliated al Nusra front. The US is also providing weapons and tactical support to the Turkish army to fight IS, while the Turkish army and Kurdish forces are in direct conflict with one another. These contradictory foreign policies cannot be effective in bringing peace to Syria.
pk.shafaqna.com
