My heart is breaking. While our families and friends rejoice and partake in the joyous hustle of the upcoming holidays, survivors in Aleppo have posted their final goodbye messages and are literally watching their hometown crumble. For the last five or so years, Syrians have suffered without relief and their pain has gone largely unnoticed, especially by the U.S. media.
It is unacceptable that our President-elect, Donald Trump, continues to be uneducated about the current situation and seemingly oblivious to the intricacies of moving forward and finding a solution. The worst part is that nobody really seems to care. We shed more light on Trump and Kanye meeting than to the quickly deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Syria, where approximately 250,000 people remained trapped and running dangerously low on supplies and medical care in what was once their most populous city. And now? Aleppo has fallen.
In light of this past Friday’s evacuation halt and massacres, it is even more important for us to educate ourselves and others in an effort to spread awareness so we can better support the refugees and the organizations that are attempting to aid them. Living in a democratic republic, it is our responsibility to make sure that our government is educated on the topic and aware that its citizens care about Syria’s humanitarian travesty and Assad’s war crimes so that we can do our part.
The fall of Aleppo and Assad’s victory was a grave calamity and left Syrians devastated. There was never going to be an easy answer to Syria’s civil war. However, options to exercise our privilege and power and help the people in Aleppo still exist. Besides donating to a charity, we can do a lot to affect change by writing to your elected officials, volunteering if you have relevant skills (speaking Arabic, for example), or lending your support to the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, which would help the U.S. and other countries to possibly adopt Canada’s private refugee sponsorship system.
Most importantly, staying quiet cannot be an option. In the past, our silence has allowed mass genocide to happen, and this time, let us not sit idle as history repeats itself.
