Airstrikes carried out last weekend by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad serve as just the latest brutal reminder of the total war that is being waged in the country, and evince a divisive strategy by the regime against the people it once called its fellow countrymen and women.
Rights groups, as well as activists in Syria, reported as many as 100 people killed in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Sunday; an attack described as "an official massacre" by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based watchdog.
This isn't the first time Douma has suffered under Assad's cynical and severe tactics, and it probably won't be the last. A tinderbox of anti-Assad protest in the early days of the Syrian uprising, the community has been the target of brutal massacres and bombardments for years now.
That the regime targeted the Damascus suburb's primary market during rush hour was undoubtedly deliberate -- punishment dispensed upon a people guilty of harboring rebel elements, chiefly the Free Syrian Army.
And it isn't just in Douma that Assad's suburb strategy is now coming into focus. In Moadamiyeh, the government has instituted strict checkpoints, and is now literally walling off and starving out its people. The Daily Beast's Michael Weiss explains:
"For years, the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyah [sic] has seen the worst of Bashar al-Assad's war crimes. Not only was it hit with sarin gas in the infamous August 2013 attack, its people also were subjected to a year-long terror-famine -- a policy of ‘starvation or submission,' as one Assad regime official put it at the time.
A ‘truce' was supposed to allow food, medical equipment, and people to come and go from Moadamiyah, but after serial violations the regime has now quietly constructed a 4-meter earthen wall to block off the last remaining point of entry and exit. For five nights straight, the town has faced artillery bombardment and today there have been reports of daytime shelling as well. Six are dead and dozens more injured, according to residents."
But when the regime looks at communities like Douma and Moadamiyeh, it no longer sees people or public interest -- it only sees crucial access points to hospitals, army bases, and loyalist communities, such as the Alawites. But in order to faithfully control and secure these places, the government must punish and isolate others.
This is a cold, calculated acknowledgement of this war's stakes, of which the continuity of the Syrian state no longer appears to be one. And a Syria in which the Assad regime is no longer an objective force for stability and cohesive action, but rather one of several sectarian actors, is a far more dangerous and deadly place for the civilians caught in the middle.
