Zarif, Lavrov declare “common position” on Syria

The UN Security Council announced on Aug. 17 that Syria “has become the largest humanitarian emergency crisis in the world today, threatening peace and security in the region.”

It is a mark of despair that many will hardly consider this news, and that the scope of the Syrian tragedy — “at least 250,000 have been killed, including well over 10,000 children, and 12 million people have been forced to flee their homes, including over 4 million who have sought refuge in neighboring countries, and more than 12.2 million people in Syria require urgent humanitarian assistance,” according to the latest UN tally, has become so familiar that it no longer shocks, which is itself shocking.

We could of course note, in a review of the news of the week, the brutal killing by the Islamic State of two scholars of antiquities in Palmyra, the efforts to contain an outbreak of typhoid in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, and the Syrian government’s bombing of a rebel-held town that reportedly killed 100 civilians and which the United Nations’ top official for humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, termed “appalling.”