Today's Darkening Environment

摘要

2016 was not a great year, but to round it all up in comes Bashar al-Assad's victory in Aleppo, Syria, defining an arrival of a new kind of barbarism. Combatants, for the most part, do respect minimum rules, i.e. civilians are not stand-ins for enemy troops. Organisations such as the Red Cross, independently and impartially acting on either side on the basis of no other value than human need, in the past were almost always allowed to do their work. This is not happening in Aleppo, where any respect for humanitarian principle was kicked in the proverbial.