Syria’s war: ‘a new low’ as 50 die in mosque bombing

Consider just two dimensions of the cynicism of this war. It is a little after nine in the morning. It would later grow hazy from cloud difting up from the Golan Heights to dusty Damascus, then grey, glowering, with the threat of rain in the still-edgy March desert air. For now though, nobody is about. Two children play across the road in what is a still sunny morning.

Across the junction the soldiers do not interfere for once. They know our business. The get that the tripod and camera have only one focus and it is not them. They can sit and smoke in peace, cradling their Kalashnikovs, bored in their reflective shades.

For our business lies the other side of the road from living, laughing children and armed silent men in fatigues.

The gates of the Iman mosque are locked. It is, we are told, a crime scene. On the marble steps bloodstains stream down the verticals, stopping where they congealed. There are pools, turning black in a haze of Damascene flies. The other side of locked gates nothing can disturb their feeding.

And there is more. Black lumps of matter. Pieces of people. Nobody has had time. Nobody has yet come. The volunteers who will later arrive will be turned back by policemen murmuring about a crime scene.

“A terrible crime,” one officer calls it. As if all this is some kind of crime wave and not a vast and vicious two-year-old civil war.

Beyond the gates red footprints on the pavement. Who were they? Helpers? Stretcher-bearers? Medics? The hallmarks of people in far too much of a life and death hurry to care where they stepped or what they stepped into?

And all this not just at a place of prayer and contemplation – but of refuge. Inside those gates, on the lower  floors, the laughter of children. It is a place where families have come to live because the fighting has made it far too dangerous to stay at home.

So they came, seeking refuge at the Iman mosque, where last night at least 50 people were blown to pieces. The first time this has happened in even this war. As cynicism goes in war, perhaps a new low is reached.

The second dimension? Why the politics of cynicism. The politics of war. The blame. The opposition coalition condemns it on the one hand then suggests President Assad‘s own thugs blew the place up. To discredit the rebels? Because some hint the aged cleric was going against the regime in some way?

Then the government itself blaming the rebels for what it says was a suicide attack. Eyewitnesses say a man stood up and yelled “allahu akbar”‘ twice before the detonation. And there is no sign of the building pierced by any incoming missile or sprayed with gunfire.

The cynicism lies in the willingness of both sides to blame the other for the outrage of an attack inside a crowded mosque. The speed of the acceptance that “the other side” will descend beyond any level of previous horror in their quest for power.

Truly, after the massacres, the mutilations, the torture, the beheadings, the throat-slittings, the rape and the use of children to decapitate prisoners, truly a new day has dawned and in the cynicism of this war a new level of descent has been reached.

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