Will images of starving Syrian children make the world resolve to end this conflict?
By Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill
Updated yesterday at 10:15pm
Photo: A photo received by the ABC on Sunday from doctors inside the besieged town of Madaya. (Supplied)
Will widespread images of starving Syrian children make the world resolve to end this nearly five-year conflict? Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill writes.
The small girl in the Syrian village of Madaya looks straight at you with her big wide eyes, holding up her pink jacket so you can see her emaciated little body, ribs sticking out.
In another video, the little boy even smiles as he lifts up his skinny arms and tells us he has not had a proper meal for a week.
Welcome to 2016, where people are starving to death as a result of deliberate, collective punishment by the armed forces of a government.
Photo: A boy in Madaya, Syria is heard saying he has not eaten properly for seven days during a video. (Supplied) Syria is certainly not a conflict where we can say "we didn't know".
Each day there is an overwhelming number of photos and videos posted from inside the country that illustrate just how horrific life is there — and this has now been going on daily for almost five years.
It started in 2011 with images of President Bashar Al Assad's forces brutally oppressing demonstrations calling for freedom and democracy.
By 2012, we saw clip after clip of Syrians being bombed by their own government as they refused to submit to the regime's demands.
Destroyed vegetable markets strewn with corpses after a barrel bomb, distraught parents pulling their children from the ruins of homes hit by government airstrikes, the horror of life under siege in Homs.
In 2013, a chemical weapons attack killed between 300 and 400 people in Ghouta.
Hours after the attack, that video was online — you could see the victims dying with your own eyes, foam coming out of their mouth as they struggled to breathe.
It was supposed to be a "red line" for the regime — but ultimately the world backed away and allowed President Assad to continue his slaughter.
In 2014, senior war crimes prosecutors in London said thousands of photographs and documents smuggled out by a Syrian police defector provided "clear evidence" of the systematic killing of 11,000 detainees by the regime.
In Damascus, the BBC's Lyse Doucet reported from the besieged Yarmouk refugee camp, where a 13-year-old boy broke down sobbing, telling her that they were hungry and there was "no bread".
At least 28 have died of starvation in Madaya: MSF
Last year, the world began to pay more attention as the horror of Islamic State and its medieval beliefs emerged out of Syria, into Iraq and onto the streets of western cities.
Beheadings, stonings, floggings, shootings, throwing people off buildings — the world responded pretty quickly once we suddenly began to feel under threat too.
Photo: A severely malnourished baby in Madaya, Syria. (Supplied)
An international coalition was rapidly organized to defeat the terrorist group and Australia joined the airstrike campaign, committing over $500 million to the task.
Meanwhile, UN officials wondered aloud why we were suddenly spending more money bombing ISIS that we had spent on humanitarian efforts over the past four years for the four million refugees who had fled the horror of life in Syria.
In September 2015, Syrian human rights groups reminded the world that as horrific as ISIS was, the vast majority of civilians being killed and continuing to be killed in Syria are murdered by their own government, not by Islamic State.
To end the year, the world stood by as Russian aircraft began to conduct airstrikes throughout the country, under the guise of helping to defeat Islamic State, but which have in reality targeted all opposition fighters and reportedly caused the deaths of more than 200 civilians.
And now in 2016 we already have the horror of Madaya, a Syrian town of 30,000 close to the Lebanese border that has been under siege by Syrian Government forces and Hezbollah militants since July.
The medical charity Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) says since a single food distribution last October, the siege has tightened into a complete stranglehold.
Residents who have tried to leave have reportedly been shot and landmines are said to surround the town.
MSF says that at least 28 people have died from starvation in the past five weeks including six babies.
Madaya is just one town of many under siege in Syria — the UN estimates that over 400,000 Syrian are living in similar conditions in 15 areas across the country.
Both regime and opposition forces are guilty of using siege warfare, a clear breach of international human rights and humanitarian laws.
So after five years of watching this country tear itself apart, the deaths of over 250,000 people, the wounding of more than 1.5 million and 4 millions refugees — is this the moment that will force the international community to re-focus its efforts to end this conflict?
The people of Syria can only hope.
Photo: Syrians wait for the arrival of an aid convoy in the besieged town of Madaya. (AFP)
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It was supposed to be a "red line" for the regime — but ultimately the world backed away and allowed President Assad to continue his slaughter.
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What do YOU think?
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Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
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