I talked
to everybody I could in Syria, That's how you
find out the truth
By Robert
Fisk
December
01, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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I’ve
spent months these past eight years in
Syria’s
amputated cities. They are a scar on all our
lives – the Russians, the Syrians, the armed
Islamists, the western powers that spent more
time trying to destroy Syria than the Syrian
regime.
The
bodies buried deep within these heaps of
concrete, the survivors, and those invisibly but
forever mentally wounded have paid the price of
our military cruelty and indifference. Many of
those who fled these gaunt cities are now in
Europe – or at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
And we don’t even know – or care? – about the
statistics. Did 350,000 die here? Or 450,000? Or
500,000? These figures have all been used, a
careless 150,000 separating the first from the
last.
Beirut, Mostar,
Sarajevo,
Aleppo,
Homs, and now
Mosul and Raqqa – we are forced to ask ourselves
if these sepulchral ruins are something we have
come to regard as natural, something we accept
or have accepted for hundreds of years: that
destruction is a natural part of history.
I hope I
don’t believe this. I’ve driven thousands of
miles across Syria, with no minders (they are
mostly called up into the army) and no
protection to reach front lines where Syrian
government soldiers, often wounded, have run and
crawled through the broken concrete to show me
Isis flags in the next field or broken house.
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If they
cross the lines, journalists will have their
heads cut off – which is why there are no
Western reporters based in the
government-besieged province of Idlib (they only
very rarely ever visit). And I’ve always
believed that regimes are to be avoided. I’m one
of the few journalists I know who has not
interviewed Assad. Talking to armies can reveal
the truth.
I reckon
half the Syrian soldiers I’ve interviewed have
later been killed. The total dead of the entire
army is a state secret, but I’ve discovered the
real figure: around 85,000 – quite a toll for
the Assad regime’s only real defenders. Until
the Russians came.
I talk to
them all. It’s my job. One general, ‘The Tiger’,
was so used to gunfire that he spoke while
sitting in a field erupting with shell
explosions – until I realised he was already, in
his own mind, ready to be killed, and I
explained that I could hear him more clearly if
we were in a trench.
That’s
what you’ve got to remember in all wars: that
you are going there to report – not to die.
This
article was originally published by "The
Independent"
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