27 october 2016, what is a leppo ?

So said an american president candidate, though for once not the one you would imagine. Still, a greater indictment of the pitifully low priority the west gives to the slaughter in syria is harder to imagine. Aleppo in particular is a lightning rod for us on our comfy sofas, with maybe a quarter of its more than a million population under endless syrian and russian bombs, alongside street-by-street terror, starvation and medical deprivation. It would be the srebrenica of our time, except the death toll there was some 7000, whereas aleppo's is many times that and counting; srebrenica lasted days, aleppo years. And in srebrenica, at least there was an international force trying (albeit failing dismally) to protect those european civilians. Their arab counterparts have been totally abandoned. For the perpetrators of srebrenica, at least, at last, came some justice, through the ictfy in the hague. Its standing successor, the international criminal court, is now on the brink of collapse, as led by a rotten pretoria, one african country another looks to pull out. So even after the fact, the victims of aleppo may not even have the prospect of redress. Aleppo is a big, bloody stain on us all, fiddling around brexit as syria burns. Big power politics is back, with conflict subsumed in the realpolitik of one of its main providers offered safe harbour on its way to add more oxygen to the flames. It's no wonder syrians are fleeing anywhere they can, but quite a wonder we have the global wherewithal to do so little about it; criminal negligence surely. That's what aleppo is.