Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images. Ruined buildings in the village of Ma’arrat al-Nu’man after a weekslong regime offensive against rebel-held areas in Syria’s Idlib province, February 12, 2020

MundoOriente Próximo,

In response to:

“And the Oscar Goes to… A Simplified Story of Syria’s Civil War,” NYR Daily, February 6, 2020.

To the Editor:

Since December 1, when the Syrian regime and Russia resumed their assault on Idlib, 832,000 civilians have been displaced, most of them children. Two hundred and eighty-six civilians were killed in the month of January alone. The last bastions of the revolution, Saraqeb, Kafranbl, and Ma’arrat al-Nu’man, have fallen. This is the biggest displacement of the war yet—and the majority of those fleeing were already refugees, once, twice, even six times over.

Still convulsed from the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, the West worries about migration, but less so about its causes.…  Seguir leyendo »

Monumental Arch, Palmyra, Syria, 2003

MundoOriente Próximo,

In May 2015, the world watched in horror as ISIS rolled into Tadmur, home to Palmyra’s magnificent Greco-Roman ruins. The ensuing destruction was widely denounced but the extremist group’s first act of vandalism in Palmyra drew condemnations only in Syria. Just a mile northeast of the Temple of Bel (founded 32 AD), stood the Tadmur Prison, one of the Baathist regime’s most notorious. Thousands of political prisoners were incarcerated there, suffering torture, humiliation, starvation, and death. In 1980, up to 1,000 detainees had been summarily executed there as retaliation for an attempt on the then-President Hafez al-Assad’s life. When ISIS blew up this prison, it erased a place of historical importance, a monument to a nation’s agony.…  Seguir leyendo »

Journalists Paul Conroy and Marie Colvin in Libya; Colvin was killed in Syria on February 22, 2012

MundoOriente Próximo,

On February 22, 2012, when the British photojournalist Paul Conroy survived the artillery barrage that killed Marie Colvin, he was rushed to a place of greater danger. Bashar al-Assad’s war of repression has killed civilians indiscriminately, but its targeting of medical facilities has been systematic. Hospitals are the most endangered spaces in opposition-held areas. Of the 492 medical facilities destroyed in the war, Physicians for Human Rights attributes the destruction of 446 to Assad and his allies. The UN Commission of Inquiry has charged the regime and its allies with having “systematically targeted medical facilities… and intentionally attacking medical personnel.” With a pierced abdomen and a fist-sized hole in his thigh, Conroy was carried to hospital under a hail of mortar fire.…  Seguir leyendo »