effects of WAR TO INNOCENT PEOPLES of syria

DON'T DARE THE WAR TO COME TO YOUR SIDE

posted by JUDITH DUBIN OCTOBER 13,2013 in SNEAK PEEK

Talk about a grim addition (or substitution?) to the menu.

In a development largely unnoticed beyond the outskirts of strife-torn Damascus, a religious decree has given the overwhelmingly Muslim population there permission to eat common household animals as an alternative to starvation.

Vocativ has analyzed the “fatwa”, which comes from a leading Sunni Muslim cleric in Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Damascus that many call a district. The fatwa grants permission to eat dogs, cats and donkeys in some of the areas worst affected by Syria’s nearly 3-year-old civil war.

Activists say Yarmouk has been suffering under a blockade imposed more than 3 months ago by Syrian army forces. The fatwa has also spread widely via social media to several rebel-occupied Syrian towns around Damascus that, like Yarmouk, are under siege by the army of President Bashar al-Assad, their supply lines choked by regime soldiers and their electricity cut off.

The timing is significant. On Tuesday, Muslims celebrate the Festival of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha. Muslims have to sacrifice an animal – usually a goat, a sheep or a lamb – and then eat it. Because there are no cattle left in some of Syria’s war ravaged towns, the fatwa gives the residents permission to sacrifice any animal they can find. It is an “awful situation”, says one activist AbuMalek from the Damascus neighborhood of Barzeh. “In our faith eating those animals is forbidden because eating it cause diseases, but when people have nothing to feed their children they have to save their lives even if they’ve been (forbidden) to eat those things.”

While Barzeh has its “bad days”, East Ghouta, a suburb just south of Damascus has been particularly hard hit. It’s where an alleged chemical attack in August reportedly killed more than a thousand people. Opposition forces control East Ghouta but the area has been under siege by the Syrian Army for the better part of a year. Vocativ reported about the dire situation in East Ghouta in early September, noting that almost no food nor medical supplies had got into the area for more than 6 months and that basics like bread were expensive and scarce. Residents say soldiers man checkpoints and prevent anyone or anything going in or out.

Facebook post about the fatwa

A spokesman for a group calling itself Unified Human Rights Office in East Ghouta, tells Vocativ the situation in towns and suburbs south of Damascus is particularly bad. His group posted a message on Facebook about the fatwa alongside a photo of an emaciated child, saying children were  dying of starvation, including seven children in one suburb alone. “ The ‘civilized’ world passed very fast a resolution in the UN to destroy the chemical weapons of Assad,” the group wrote in a Facebook message, “but they did not pass an obligatory (resolution) to force him to (provide) the humanitarian help to those who are suffering…