Opinion: Syria under attack and may need America’s help

Details: Created on Tuesday, 09 October 2012 10:43

Michael Bragg

Piles of bodies, one of the oldest civilizations in the world subjected to rubble and not a single thing is being done to stop a government from annihilating its people.

This is a typical day in Syria.

The leader of Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, has lead an all out assault on a large fraction of his people -- the Sunni Muslim population, accounting for a majority of the opposition and roughly 75 percent of Syria, according to The New York Times -- that all started in March 2011 over a protest of the torture of students for anti-government graffiti.

At the end of September of this year, the death toll has come to 4,631 civilian deaths and 30,541 since the clashes between the Syrian government and rebel forces began 18 months ago, according to Reuters.

And to make matters worse, Turkey has fired artillery into Syria for several days as of Oct. 6 because Syrian shells began falling on Turkish land, according to The New York Times.

The heartbreaking scenes from the Tumblr blog "The Revolting Syrian" publishes videos and images that graphically and explicitly present visuals of human lives lost on the ground. The pictures of children blown in half by Assad's bombings and snipers delivering bullets to penetrate a 10-year-old's forehead are beyond gruesome.

They're an immoral disregard for innocent human life.

In fact, the images are indisputably comparable to the grotesque footage of the Allies' discovery of the Holocaust's aftermath

Why has the United States and every other country done nothing to stop the killing? Sure the United Nations has asked and pressured Assad to stop, but how much can that do?

Can we afford to get involved?

Can we risk going into another confrontation on the ground in the Middle East after we've begun scaling back from that area already?

It's true that we cannot get involved militarily in every human tragedy on the face of this planet, but when a government slaughters its people mercilessly everyday and death tolls break 30,000, is that the signal to intervene for the sake of our brothers and sisters in Syria?

Back in August, President Barack Obama issued a threat to Assad that if the tyrant did show signs of preparing or moving his "arsenal of unconventional weapons," then the U.S. military would intervene, according to The New York Times.

Kudos, Mr. President.

The bottom line is this civil war has gone on long enough.

The fighting needs to stop and these innocent people should not have to worry about pulling their family member's bodies or what is left of them from the heaps of concrete and wood that is the result of their own leader condemning them to certain death.

To see first hand what is happening on the ground, visit therevoltingsyrian.com, but at your own discretion. The images are both haunting and powerful.