7 year old Haider, shot by a US-backed “moderate rebel” sniper (Photo: supplied to 21st Century Wire by residents of Al Foua)
Vanessa Beeley
21st Century Wire
On the 15th September, 7 year old Haider Ammar Al Hamoud, was shot through the stomach by an Ahrar Al Sham sniper, the US backed terrorist group besieging the Idlib villages of Kafarya and Foua. Haider was ignored by western media.
His life-threatening injury did not merit any outcry from human rights organisations or the NATO-aligned media who ignore the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of children in Syria because it does not serve their agenda to demonize the Syrian President, Bashar al Assad or the national armed forces.
Photo of 7 year old Haider Ammar Al Hamoud, shot by US backed “moderate rebel” snipers. Photo: Supplied to 21st Century Wire
On the same day, we have been told that two other villagers were also wounded by sniper attacks. Akkak Ahmed Hassan, 25 and Jawad Sofan, 18 in the neighbouring village of Kafarya. Ahrar Al Sham are a heavily protected US asset conducting assassinations on behalf of their donors and backers, operating across Syria, but nowhere more viciously than against these two besieged, starving villages living under threat of a full scale ethnic cleasning.
Their situation can easily be compared to that of Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave, blockaded from all sides and under a long term siege by another US backed terrorist entity, the illegal state of Israel.
This incident highlights yet again, the farce that is the US intention, or lack of it, to adhere to a US-Russian brokered ceasefire. The US has no intention of muzzling its terrorist entities that are breaking the ceasefire on a daily basis, as they have done during all previous ceasefire deals.
Ceasefire agreements that are nothing more than a smokescreen for the replenishing of arms and equipment of US and NATO member state terrorists, under any rebrand or name change that is employed to obscure their connections to Washington and her allies.
Please refer to the Syrian Arab News Agency report on all ceasefire breaches on the 15th September:
“The armed groups breached the truce regime 55 times on Thursday in Damascus, Damascus Countryside, Hama, Lattakia countryside, Homs, Quneitra, and Daraa, according to a military source.
In Idleb, a child was injured as the armed groups opened sniper fire towards the besieged town of al-Foua, in the northern countryside of Idleb province, in another breach of the truce regime.
Local sources told SANA that the armed terrorist groups that hole up in Binnish town targeted with sniper fire citizens’ houses in al-Foua town, causing the injury of 7-year-old child.”
Why is Haider’s suffering worth less than that of Omran, the child allegedly pulled from the rubble of a bombed building in Nusra Front occupied eastern Aleppo?
Why is Haider swept under the carpet of disinterest? Why is Haider’s face, his eyes closed in silent pain, not appearing on the BBC, Fox News, CNN, Channel 4? Why does Haider’s fate not provoke the same degree of government outcry and beating of chests against the brutality of the world inhabited by the children of Syria?
Because Haider symbolizes the daily mass murder being perpetrated against the children of Syria, directly, by US, NATO, EU, Gulf State and Israeli governments [via their terrorist proxies], and indirectly, by these media outlets who criminally obfuscate the truth of the dirty war on Syria.
Haider exposes these governments for the war criminals they truly are and for that, his suffering must be suppressed and silenced while Omran who serves their “regime change” agenda must have his story propagandized and amplified. Omran, unwittingly, becomes a poster boy for war while Haider is muted into insignificance by those who allocate only the images & stories that promote the “need” for war to their editors and news desks.
Thus, the US and NATO-aligned media and their state sponsors have criminally weaponized children in the march towards an escalation in the genocidal war on Syria.
The suffering of Kafarya and Foua does not end there..
Ali Sheikh Hamed, 60+ years old, starving, in Kafarya and Foua (Photo: Supplied to 21st Century Wire)
This is Ali Sheikh Hamed, over 60 years old and he is starving. Genuinely starving, unlike the fake images that have also flooded social media and mainstream media of the Madaya “starvation”. I have been told that Hamed is exhausted, his body, lacking esssential nutrients, has wasted away to shrunken flesh and brittle bones. He has lost over 30 kgs in weight and is now down to a meagre 45kg. He is suffering from severe anemia and his body has no resistance against the diseases that are spreading through the two villages due to the lack of clean water, medicines and polluted living conditions.
When I was in Syria, I met with a young man who had managed to escape from Kafarya and Foua under cover of darkness and was now working with various Syrian state organisations, based in Damascus, to get aid and vital supplies of food and medicine into the two villages. He explained how the US backed Ahrar Al Sham gangs would intercept the aid convoys and steal all the contents, promising to pass them on to the residents of Kafarya and Foua. Of course they never did.
This is a familiar story when the various NATO gangs and counter gangs are imposing an external siege or internal occupation upon the towns and villages of Syria. Any aid that does enter or is sent through, is requisitioned by these terrorists and either sold at inflated and extortionate prices to the Syrian people or simply stolen and given to the terrorists themselves and their families.
Ahmed Birqadr, 13, starving, in Kafarya. Photo: Supplied to 21st Century Wire
Ahmed is thirteen years old. He weighs less than 30kg and he is 110 cm tall. Again, the lack of essential nutrients in his diet have stunted his growth and physical development.
As one Syrian campaigner for the lifting of the siege on Kafarya and Foua told me:
“We appeal to the UN and human rights organisations to lift this inhumane siege and to allow humanitarian aid including food, urgently needed medical supplies and water to enter the besieged villages. The maintenance of this siege is a crime against humanity and this detention of civilians as hostages of war is a crime, of the utmost gravity”
21st Century Wire previously published the official statement that was issued to the UN by the medical staff in Kafarya and Foua: UN Allied with Terrorism over Deliberate Malpractice in Kafarya and Foua
As Eva Bartlett stated in a recent 21st Century Wire article, The Children of Kafarya and Foua are Crying in the Dark:
“A true humanitarian crisis of malnutrition, starvation, and untreated diseases has been occurring for over a year in Syria far from cameras and headlines, and has been steadily worsening under the total siege, imposed since March 2015 by terrorists of the Jaysh al-Fateh (Army of Conquest) coalition on the two northern Syrian villages of Foua and Kafarya, completely isolated and surrounded by Western-backed terrorists.
The Syrian poster child of suffering is not the ‘Aleppo boy‘ whose image was recently splashed on front pages and social media in a coordinated act of propaganda. The Syrian poster children of suffering—starvation, murder, maiming, and denial of medical care, thanks to Western-backed terrorists—are many, but perhaps the most severe and continued examples these days come from Foua and Kafarya.”
The NGO Complex Weaponisation of Children
Human Rights Watch and other similarly state or deep state funded pseudo NGOs have run a number of historical campaigns protesting the use of “children as weapons of war” highlighting the conversion of children into child soldiers which is the physical manifestation of a worrying trend towards the use of children as instruments of war.
This ignores and distracts from the more cynical weaponisaton of children via the exploitation of their suffering as the propaganda that propels us towards war after war, a state of perpetual conflict whose primary beneficiary is the military industrial complex.
Children are used to sell war, which sells weapons, which kill the children in those campaign posters.
None is more guilty than the NGO complex or the mainstream media of the misuse of any number of propagandized gender issues , minority persecution or children of war issues as justification for military escalation and intervention inside prey nations ripe for regime change or resource plundering by the governments running these imperialist NGO outreach operations.
Mainstream media has developed into nothing more than a PR agency for NATO’s perpetual war campaign, producing one slick advertising campaign after another to promote militarism and justify mass murder in the geopolitical interests of the governments they work for.
The infamous Amnesty International 2012 campaign: “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan” and “NATO: Keep the Progress Going!
Read more on the NGO complex and its role in de-stablizing nations prior to and during US, NATO state illegal interventions in this 21st Century Wire article: An Introduction: Smart Power and the Human Rights Industrial Complex
Who is responsible for the child abuse in Syria?
The children of Syria are being abused, tortured, kidnapped and murdered but it is those who claim they are working in the “interests” of these children who are responsible for their pain. The US and NATO member states, supported by their allies have imposed this brutal war upon these children and must take the majority of the blame for the consequences of this war.
The mainstream media are accessories to these crimes, as it is their propaganda and reprehensible lack of balanced reporting that ensures perpetual conflict, not only in Syria but globally.
These Syrian children are being abused by the very nations that outwardly present themselves as paragons of virtue and defenders of human rights yet who have no qualms over capitalising on the suffering of the children they claim to be protecting if it furthers their geopolitical aims and ambitions.
Syria does not need NATO member states or the US to protect its children. The children of Syria are best protected by the Syrian national army that is keeping the NATO terrorists at bay. The Syrian state is ensuring all children receive free medical care and education, despite the externally imposed war and US, EU criminal sanctions.
The children of Syria need us to force our governments to lift the crippling sanctions on Syria, to stop arming and funding the reported 360,000 foreign mercenaries who are destroying their homes and massacring their families and above all to get out of their country and take their criminal,mass-murdering gangs with them.
Then and only then will these children be “protected” and able to heal from the trauma of a five year war imposed upon them by our governments or be able to return to some semblance of normality in the fractured and bleeding country they call home.
Starving child in Kafarya and Foua besieged by US supported terrorists, Ahrar al Sham and Nusra Front. Photo: Supplied to 21st Century Wire.
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