Syrians are devastated by their ongoing civil war, which during more than 2,000 days has forced more than half of them from their homes. It has also caused an estimated 400,000 deaths since 2011 in what the U.N. humanitarian chief, Stephen O'Brien, says is a “pitiless and merciless abyss of a humanitarian catastrophe.” It has contributed to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the inhuman ISIS to emerge in a struggle affecting the entire region.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s truce agreement with Russia of Sept. 9 this year would have permitted aid deliveries to reach desperate civilians in rebel-held parts of Aleppo. On Sept. 19, despite it, Russian and Syrian planes destroyed at least 18 of 31 trucks in a U.N. convoy carrying humanitarian aid to Aleppo. The normally diplomatic U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the attack as “savage and apparently deliberate,” adding that the fate of Syria could not depend on the “future of one man.”
