“If Halabi is the highest-ranking Syrian war criminal who can be arrested, it is only because the greater monsters are protected.” Ben Taub’s piece on the Halabi brings to attention the ways — and the extent to which — war criminals are protected, and in a way how impunity and protection enables them in committing horrific crimes. The higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more you have to offer any side that dominates the war in any given moment, if you are willing to sacrifice loyalty. Ben Taub’s latest piece along side the Halabi piece gives a close up of is the role of individual people in the war — whether the role is as the perpetrator of some of the horrors of the war or as the documenter of the crimes with the hope that someday the perpetrator may be brought to justice. The Halabi piece especially is almost fictitious, almost. It has all the featured of a Netflix thriller, a war criminal, chased by CIJA, but elusive to their grasp because of a wide, corrupt or incompetent, network of institutions and authority figures offering him shelter. The end? The bad guy gets away — but this of course wasn’t on accident, just the way a director engineers the plot, Halabi’s story was engineered to end this way by his protectors.
The reading on the Beekeeper brings forth the stories of a different set of individuals in the war — the powerless. Most civilians are powerless in a war, and women and children are perhaps the most vulnerable but the way ISIS exploited the vulnerability of Yazidi women in Sinjar is just unfathomably inhumane. The stories from the Beekeeper show the many levels at which the women were tortured, the first was the individual sexual violation they experienced, the second was the risk they put the women’s children in (like making bombs and connecting wires which if done wrong would most certainly result in the child’s death) to force compliance from the women, the third was forced cultural cleansing and starting a new family with another man. And the escape from this tortured life was not any less perillious. Diving deeper into stories of escape, Patrick Kingsley’s piece sheds light on the plight of refugees on their treacherous journey to the West. Death is perhaps the most known outcome of the journey to news readers in the West, but Kingsley closely follows the journey in its many stages, revealing the challenge of a journey which someone who could hop on a flight to Europe couldn’t fathom being so difficult.
