By Thomas Gaist: More than 200 civilians, including 35 children, were killed as military
violence erupted across Syria this week, leaving the ceasefire agreement
brokered by US and Russian diplomats in February in tatters.
The renewed fighting, the latest upsurge in
a war that has already killed more than 400,000 people, is pushing Syria deeper
into conditions of social collapse. Recent days have witnessed a “catastrophic
deterioration” in the security situation, with violence across Syria “soaring
back to the levels we saw prior to the cessation of hostilities,” and military
forces displaying a “monstrous disregard” for civilians, according to UN human
rights official Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein.
Syria’s social and health infrastructure
has been devastated by more than five years of the US-orchestrated war for
regime change. “Almost half of Syria’s ambulances have been destroyed; more
than one-third of its hospitals no longer function; and the flow of
pharmaceutical imports has slowed to a trickle,” Debarati Guha-Sapir of the
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters said Friday.