12th February 2016

While the sun seems to never set on the Madaya propaganda, Kafarya and Foua remains in the media shade.  Still barely mentioned in mainstream media, the residents of Kafarya and Foua continue their daily struggles of a life under NATO backed terrorist siege.

The precarious ceasefire that has been broken many times since it was first implemented in August 2015, is still shattered by regular shelling of civilian homes in these two Idlib villages.  I was speaking with one resident last week when he had to cut the conversation short as a house nearby had been hit by the terrorist shelling.

Anyone attempting to enter or leave the villages is liable to be shot by terrorist snipers positioned in the surrounding countryside.  The UN still claims insurmountable difficulties and an inability to bypass the Ahrar al Sham checkpoints along the road into Kafarya & Foua.

Recent air drops by the Syrian Arab Air Force have succeeded in breaking the siege and supplying minimal medicines & food but the fuel situation is still desperate.  The only delivery made back in January of a meagre 10,000 litres, is rapidly running out leaving hospitals unable to provide emergency treatment and ongoing chronic illness care.

One of the most heartbreaking images sent through to me is of a family member struggling to keep their relative alive by manual artificial respiration.  There is no electricity to run the machinery that would normally keep them alive.  Family members take it in turns to maintain the vital supply of oxygen or else this patient will die. Life hangs in the balance wherever you look in Kafarya and Foua.  A malevolent, hostile force camped on their doorstep and villagers starving, cold and eking a miserable existence among the remains of their homes inside these decimated villages.

Barely any medical supplies remaining.

A few days ago tiny baby Zahraa relinquished her hold on life, succumbed to the starvation that had wracked her body from the moment she was born.  She was not mentioned by the Guardian or the New York Times.  She is irrelevant to the propagandists, life is meaningless to them unless it serves their purpose to demonize the Syrian Government and Army.

The people of Kafarya and Foua maintain their valiant struggle against the forces that bear down upon them and they resist in silence, an externally imposed silence.  Like so many of the Syrian people they know only too well who is the enemy in their midst and it is not the Syrian Arab Army.  Their Army is the Syrian people, as Mother Agnes Mariam de la Croix expressed so eloquently.  They know their enemy are the NATO  US proxy thugs camped among them bringing pestilence and death.  These preying locusts will be driven out of Syria by the peoples Army and their allies and the children of Kafarya and Foua will be liberated from the pall of terror that has been hanging over them for almost 5 years.

“Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.” ~ Edward Said.