A ruler with no kingdom left

The predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani is devastated after months under siege by Islamist forces and airstrikes by a United States-led coalition (Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images).

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You can find Bashar al-Assad's history on Wikipedia and you can find thoughts about his motivations in the Atlantic Monthly, but his kingdom is mostly gone because of chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other attacks on his people.

It should be noted that Syria has become a war zone and, while Assad is responsible for much of the damage, the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS), a United States-led coalition, and Russian forces enlisted by Assad have contributed. Wondering what's left for Assad to rule, I went searching.

The picture of Kobani above was found at From Syria, an Atlas of a Country in Ruins, March 2015. The same article gives a graphic representation of  the building damage level in Aleppo. It's worse now, since the Russians began bombing. (Legend: RED Destroyed; ORANGE Severe; OCHRE Moderate)

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An analysis of 210 sites in the city’s old quarters concluded that about half were
damaged and one-fifth were destroyed. New York Times

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The New York Times said of Syria After Four Years of Mayhem:

Half of Syrians Displaced (Mar 2015)
The war has displaced 7.6 million people inside Syria and pushed 3.9 million more — half of them children — to seek refuge in other countries, according to figures collected by United Nations agencies.

Lately, Assad's tactics have been bombing schools and hospitals. Foreign Policy reports Syrian MSF Hospital Kept Location Secret to Avoid Being Bombed. The Médecins Sans Frontières-supported hospital was destroyed anyway (Feb, 2016).

For an idea of how the Syrian Free Press on Wordpress sees it all, take a look at the Real SyrianFreePress Network (not sure this is an 'official' site).

If Bashar wins, he will have few people left to rule and little infrastructure to support civilized living. So what's the point of winning?

-- Marge

Veterans Day 2015

An American soldier greets his wife and son after returning home from a 14-month
deployment to Iraq (Getty Images), BBC News

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Nineteen million veterans (2014 census) of war live among us in America, yet what do we do to help them transition from military life to civilian life? First, learn about their experience.

Here are two stories told by people who experienced war as active participants.

Wes Moore: How to talk to veterans about the war

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Sebastion Junger: Why veterans miss war

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Journalist Sebastian Junger wrote about veterans returning from war an opinion piece in the Washington Post:

Civilians tend to do things that make them, not the veterans, feel better. Yellow ribbons and parades do little to help with the emotional aftermath of combat. War has been part of human culture for tens of thousands of years, and most tribal societies were engaged in some form of warfare when encountered by Western explorers. It might be productive to study how some societies reintegrated their young fighters after the intimate carnage of Stone Age combat. It is striking, in fact, how rarely combat trauma is mentioned in ethnographic studies of cultures.

Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a celebration in which the fighters described the battle in great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his community, and every person in the community knew that their lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the people they were defending. A question like the one recently posed to me wouldn’t begin to make sense in a culture such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.

-- Marge