Russian technology that failed to notice a million people fleeing Idlib

The Russian Ministry of Defense, ignoring the tragedy that one million people are living through in the middle of this winter, people whose homes were destroyed by the blind bombs it dropped itself on Idlib, who lost many of their relatives, and who set out for Turkey to save their own lives, had shamelessly put forward as the cause of the crisis "Turkey's failure to separate moderate opposition from terrorists."

Let us say Turkey could not separate moderate opposition from terrorists, which, to be fair, may sometimes really not be easy; but is it that hard to separate women and children from terrorists? President Erdoğan in fact keeps raising these vital questions in his private dialogue with Putin, and as far as we can learn, Putin accepts the situation and agrees with Erdoğan. But the words coming from the Ministry of Defense, which is subordinate to him, show that in Russia too the situation is at times no different from that in the USA. That is, there is an armed bureaucracy that does not listen to Putin and implements its own policy in the field without taking Putin into account at all.

This bureaucracy, taking refuge in the pretext of Turkey's failure to separate moderate opposition from terrorists, has on top of that also stated that it considers the reports about the one million refugees heading toward the Turkish border exaggerated, even fabricated.

The ministry official has said that the reports that the refugees in the Idlib de-escalation zone are leaving the area en masse do not reflect the truth, that the reports in some press organs are not based on concrete findings, and even that a significant part of Idlib's residents have left the dangerous areas safely and moved to areas under government control.

It is precisely the negligence and shamelessness of "I bomb, and I don't get involved in the rest, I don't see." How frightening is this negligence toward humanitarian matters on the part of the owner of capabilities that, in this age of communication technologies, can focus on any desired point from tens of thousands of meters up and analyze it down to the cells?

Yet there is no need for this much technology to test the result of your savage actions in Idlib. It is more than enough to answer this simple question: where did the one million people who have reached the Turkish border come from? Would this many adults, in the middle of this winter, throw their women and children into a terrifying adventure with no end in sight, in snow, ice and mud, for their own pleasure?

In case the figure "one million" no longer stirs any emotion "as a statistic," let us proceed from some concrete examples; perhaps that will be more of a wake-up call.

Three stories that appeared yesterday in Yeni Şafak and in other agencies as well. Just three examples out of millions like them:

ONE. İman Mahmud Leyla is only one of the babies in Idlib who succumbed to the cold. Although only 1.5 years had passed since she came into the world, she had experienced great suffering. Her family of four had to flee the village of Hamuriye in Eastern Ghouta, where the Assad regime shed blood in torrents. Because the bombs did not leave them alone, they had to migrate many times. Their last stop was the village of Mareta, one hour from Afrin. They took shelter in an unplastered shop consisting of only four walls, with no glass, no window, no bathroom, no toilet. But little Leyla's small body could not endure this suffering any longer. The father, who woke up one morning to find his daughter lying motionless, took his child in his arms and set out. The father, who walked a full hour with Leyla's lifeless body, received answers at the hospital that he did not want to hear. The doctors said that Leyla, who had bid farewell to the world with her eyes open, had frozen to death. The father, devastated by the terrible news, despite the doctors' insistence of "let us take you home by car," took his grief in his arms and walked an hour back to his home, and entrusted his daughter to the bosom of the earth.

TWO. The Hammadi family. The family migrated from Kafr Ruma to the town of Maarat Misrin. The family, which settled in the al-Ziya camp in the village of Killi, was among those Syrians who felt lucky to have been able to find a makeshift tent. But this find was not enough to save their lives. To protect themselves from the cold that reached minus 10 degrees at night, they placed a brazier in the middle of the tent. Since they had no fuel, they lit the brazier by throwing their clothes and shoes into it. The father, Sitayf Hammadi, lay down to sleep with his little ones Hur and Huda beside him; the mother curled up in a corner. But this was their last sleep. Overcome by the smoke from the brazier, the Hammadi family died in each other's arms.

THREE. Muhammad Qusay Salja. He was 16 years old, but nobody knew where he was from or knew his family. He had come to Maarat Misrin from the interior of Syria, fleeing the bombardment. He was staying in an old chicken farm. He had neither a bed nor a blanket. On Monday night he did not wake from the sleep of death in which he lay on the concrete. By the time those who found him got him to the hospital, he had long since died. The words of the nurse who intervened to bring him back, "His body was so frozen that we could hardly insert the needle into his arm," summed up Salja's drama. The death of Ammar al-Sulayman, who was mentally disabled and was staying in Maarshurin, was also from the cold. Sulayman, too, died frozen in the tent where he had taken shelter to protect himself from the cold.

This humanitarian tragedy of the century, which confronts us as the result of the irresponsible attacks Russia has undertaken to save the murderous Assad regime, shows in fact how great a threat our humanity as a whole is under. It is the picture of how one of the two superpowers of the bipolar world has today turned into a slaughter machine that thinks only of its own interests.

Really, why are Russia and Iran in Syria only a part of the war and of the political solution? Why are they not a part of the solution to this humanitarian tragedy that arises from their very own actions? Why does no one even think of inviting them to be a part of this solution?

Is it not more than enough of a disgrace for them that hope in them has been lost on the humanitarian issues of our world?