You probably never heard of Madaya.
It’s a town in Syria near the Lebanese border that has been under rebel control, and now is under seige by Hezbollah and the Syrian regime.
And the people are starving to death. That mass starvation has received very little media coverage in the U.S. until the past couple of days.
ABC News (Australian Broadcast Company) reports:
Doctors inside the besieged Syrian town of Madaya say five more people died of starvation on Sunday, including a nine-year-old boy.The town of up to 40,000 people, near the capital Damascus, has been under siege by government forces and Hezbollah militants since July.Twenty-eight people, including six babies, are reported to have died from starvation in the past month.The latest deaths were confirmed by the international medical charity Medicines Sans Frontiers, who warned on Monday a further 200 patients could deteriorate to a critical condition within a week without urgent aid.
The residents have been reduced to eating dogs and cats:
Thousands of Syrian families are starving to death as Bashar al-Assad’s regime imposes a medieval siege on two mountain towns, despite a UN-brokered ceasefire designed to allow the entry of aid….In Madaya, 40,000 civilians have been reduced to eating boiled leaves with leftovers from rubbish bins. In an interview with The Telegraph, the mother of a two-year-old child broke down in tears as she described the fight to keep her child strong enough to survive.“There is nothing. Nothing. She’s so thin I see her muscles straining through her skin when she cries, and I cannot help. I am her mother and I cannot help,” she said, the infant’s screams ringing out in the background….Abdullah, another local resident, said that he was surviving on strawberry leaves and had not eaten a full meal in three months. “When I saw this, I felt I was in Africa. We’ve had many wars in the Middle East, yes, too many wars. But we’ve never had starvation,” he said….“People here have eaten cats, they have eaten dogs. But please do not judge them – this is what desperation looks like,” said Abdullah.
The NY Times has an article that just went live about how a promised aid convoy was not allowed into town:
The town, Madaya, is controlled by rebels and encircled by pro-government forces with barbed wire, land mines and snipers. The people in the town make soups of grass, spices and olive leaves. They eat donkeys and cats. They arrive, collapsing, at a clinic that offers little but rehydration salts. Neighbors fail to recognize neighbors in the streets because their faces are so sunken.
There are reports that Hezbollah and Assad supporters on Twitter are taunting the starving resident with photos of food. The Telegraph (Britain) reports, Assad supporters taunt starving Syrians in Madaya with pictures of food:
After years of war, barrel bombs and chemical weapons, supporters of Bashar al-Assad have still managed to find a new low.Fans of the Syrian leader are using social media to ridicule the suffering of a rebel-held town where thousands of civilians are on the verge of starvation.Although social media was initially used to highlight the plight of Madaya’s residents, regime and Hizbollah supporters are now using it to taunt, uploading photographs of their evening meals and cartoon characters that they say resemble the town’s starving residents.Posted under the hashtag “solidarity with the siege of Madaya”, the images show plates overflowing with rice, fish and green vegetables.
Siege and starvation tactics are not unique to Hezbollah and Assad — the opposition ISIS fighters uses them too:
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When it comes to Madaya, though, the blame has already been placed — on a Zionist media conspiracy:
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