Syria: Before and After

Excellent essay by Shane Bauer. Describing how things got from bad to worse, culminating in Assad's siege tactics akin to the Goths and the Nazis, surrounding a city, letting the people eat all the food the soldiers would need to keep fighting, now leaving a quarter million people starving inside Syria. This story chronicles the lives of a young couple full of promise, only one of whom makes it out.

Before: "The scent of food always beckoned on Yarmouk Street: warm, cheese-filled pastries dripping with sugary syrup; the best falafel in Damascus; pizzalike things called fata'ir that came in 10 different varieties and cast tantalizing scents a block away. People were poor in Yarmouk, more so than in most of Damascus, but there was always much food. Many had large bellies."

After: "Who then could conceive that imams would one day announce it was no longer religiously taboo to eat cats or donkeys? Women and children couldn't yet dream they would soon be sifting through the grass for edible weeds. No one could imagine that on a street outside some apartments, there would be a little pile of cat heads next to men and children flaying the mangy animals and boiling them in a pot."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/syria-war-assad-starvation-hunger?page=1

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