As Syria approaches the 10-year mark in its civil war next month, the United Nations says the nation’s youngest generation is suffering most, as millions of children suffer malnourishment, stunted growth, and a lack of schooling. “More than half a million children under 5 in Syria suffer from stunting as a result of chronic malnutrition, according to our latest assessments,” U.N. Humanitarian Chief Mark Lowcock said Thursday in his monthly briefing to the Security Council on the situation. “We fear this number will increase,” he said. Lowcock said stunting is especially bad in the northwest and the northeast of the country, where data show that in some areas, up to one in three children suffers from impaired growth and development due to poor nutrition and recurrent illnesses. The effects of stunting are irreversible. Last week, Lowcock spoke with a group of Syrian doctors. At one pediatric hospital, the physicians said malnourished children occupy half of the facility’s 80 beds. In the past two months, five children have died from malnutrition. “Another pediatrician told me that she diagnoses malnutrition in up to 20 children a day,” Lowcock said. “But parents are bringing their children to her for completely different reasons, unaware that they are suffering from malnutrition. Malnutrition, she said, has become so normal that parents cannot spot the signs in their own children.” Neglect Drives Child Labor in Syria Millions of displaced Syrian children work difficult, dangerous jobs just to survive Robbed of childhoods In a decade of war, Syria’s youngest citizens have known nothing but conflict and suffering. They are among the millions of internally displaced and refugees; young girls have been married off in their teens, and boys have been recruited to fight. Children have been physically and psychologically wounded from the violence of war — both perpetrated on them and in front of them. Thousands have been killed. ...
Weapons used in the civil war
U.S. airstrike in Syria kills 1, wounds several, says Iraqi militia official
BAGHDAD — A U.S. airstrike in Syria targeted facilities belonging to a powerful Iranian-backed Iraqi armed group, killing one fighter and wounding several others, an Iraqi militia official said Friday, signaling the first military action undertaken by U.S. President Joe Biden. The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq earlier this month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops. The Iraqi militia official told The Associated Press that the strikes against the Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, hit an area along the border between the Syrian site of Boukamal facing Qaim on the Iraqi side. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak of the attack. Syria war monitoring groups said the strikes hit trucks moving weapons to a base for Iranian-backed militias in Boukamal. “I’m confident in the target that we went after, we know what we hit,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters flying with him from California to Washington, shortly after the airstrikes which were carried out Thursday evening Eastern Standard Time. The Biden administration in its first weeks has emphasized its intent to put more focus on the challenges posed by China, even as Mideast threats persist. Biden’s decision to attack in Syria did not appear to signal an intention to widen U.S. military involvement in the region but rather to demonstrate a will to defend U.S. troops in Iraq and send a message to Iran. The U.S. has in the past targeted facilities in Syria belonging to Kataeb Hezbollah, which it has blamed for numerous attacks targeting U.S. personnel and interests in Iraq. The Iraqi Kataeb is separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the war in Syria, said the strikes targeted a shipment of weapons that were being taken by trucks entering Syrian territories from Iraq. The ...
China Mocks Biden Syria Bombing: ‘America Is Back’
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper mocked President Joe Biden on Friday, quoting his declaration, “America is back,” in a headline about his decision to bomb Syria on Thursday evening. Biden made the remark in a speech about foreign policy in early February, in which he vowed to limit American military engagement. “And they know when you speak, you speak for me,” Biden told diplomats at the State Department. “And so — so is the message I want the world to hear today: America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” On Thursday, 36 days into his presidency, Biden took unilateral action in Syria, ordering what the Pentagon dubbed a “defensive precision strike” on members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a legal wing of the Iraqi armed forces. “At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces earlier this evening conducted airstrikes against infrastructure utilized by Iranian-backed militant groups in eastern Syria,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a statement. “Specifically, the strikes destroyed multiple facilities located at a border control point used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups, including Kait’ib Hezbollah (KH) and Kait’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS).” The named groups are among the most influential members of the PMF, particularly KH, or the Hezbollah Brigades. The Global Times suggested Biden had undermined his promises to the American people in its coverage of the strikes, in an article it titled with Biden’s words, “America Is Back.” the Communist Party-approved experts quoted in the piece made the case that, under President Donald Trump, the White House preferred to use economic incentives and punishments like sanctions to confront national security threats by starving them of funding. Under Biden, military violence superseded the sanctions policy, they claimed. “During the Trump era, the US tended to use economic sanctions against Iran and did not ...
DCCC chairman investigating ‘why the polling sucked’ in 2020
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.), the chairman of House Democrats' campaign arm, said Wednesday he’s doing a deep dive into the party’s election failures in 2020, including a look at “why the polling sucked.” Speaking at an event hosted by Politico, Maloney said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has commissioned a report examining why the party lost more than a dozen House seats over the course of an election in which they won the White House and a majority in the Senate. “I’m doing a deep dive to figure out why the polling sucked, why we were misled on the status of certain races … on how we do digital, on how we use qualitative research versus quantitative research,” he said. “There’s a lot to learn. We’re looking at it … and we will have a report.” ADVERTISEMENT Democrats were expecting to pick up seats and add to their majority in the House in 2020. Instead, Democrats lost 15 seats and entered the year with the smallest House majority in modern times. Maloney said Wednesday he expects the Democrats will maintain their majority in the House following the 2022 midterm elections, which are historically difficult for a new president’s party. Democrats currently hold 222 House seats. “We’re going to keep the House and it will be more than the 218 seats,” Maloney said. “I do believe we are in a strong position to retain and grow this majority … because we’ll defeat the pandemic, get the economy roaring again, and we’re not divided like the Republicans, who are trying to decide between the QAnon mob or whether to be a responsible governing party. They’re having a civil war with each other,” he said. It was particularly galling for Democrats in 2020 that the party underperformed among Latino voters in key swing states, such as Florida, and in border districts in Texas. Maloney on Wednesday accused Republicans of misrepresenting Democratic views on socialism and defunding the police, saying those attacks may have contributed ...
The $15 Minimum-Wage Debate Clarifies the Partisan Economic Divide
Republican “populists” are on the wrong side of this fight. Photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP/Shutterstock For many left-wing pundits, America’s partisan divide in 2021 is defined by its lack of a strong material basis . After all, a voter’s income level tells you less about her political allegiances today than it has for most of our nation’s modern history . In 2020, some of the wealthiest Zip Codes in the United States backed the party of organized labor by a landslide margin, while some of the poorest broke overwhelmingly for the party of libertarian billionaires. The ties that bind blue America’s tech entrepreneurs to its nonwhite gig workers — or red America’s oil barons to its white rural poor — are those of culture , not economics. Democrats stand for a multiethnic conception of American identity, secularism, cosmopolitanism, racial justice, and gender equality; Republicans, for a normatively white and Christian America, the patriarchal family, and zero-sum nationalism. In geographic terms, these divisions cleave the nation less by region than by density : All across the country, navy-blue urban cores fade into baby-blue inner-ring suburbs, red-violet exurbs and deep-red countryside. This “culture war trumps all” thesis elides many nuances. For one thing, the prominence of zero-sum nationalism in factory towns decimated by globalization surely cannot be attributed to culture alone. For another, a large segment of nonwhite Democrats espouse right-of-center views on immigration and gender, and thus, vote less on the basis of cultural attitudes than some combination of communal bonds, historical memory, and economic interest. Nevertheless, if liberals’ culturalist account of America’s political divide has its flaws, the “populist” right’s efforts to cast the conflict between red and blue in strictly materialist terms — with Republicans representing the interests of blue-collar workers in the heartland, and Democrats of cosseted professionals in ...
