I’m in Homs on my sixth visit to this vibrant city since May 2016 as an independent, self-funded activist and social media amateur journalist.
Since peace and stability have been restored and life is returning, the “professional news media” is absent. As usual, they miss the real story.
But they were here en masse when the US and allies were sponsoring numerous “rebel” armed groups – you know the headchopping mercenary jihadis that the “professional” journalists proclaimed as “freedom fighters”.
Like the Omar Farouk Brigade whose commander cannibalized a Syrian soldier killed defending his homeland from the terrorist hordes armed and funded by the “leaders of the free world.”
Like the US created and supported Free Syrian Army that US Ambassador Robert Ford made sure got American money, advanced weapons, and intelligence that was just a front to get the money, weapons and intelligence to al Qaeda here (called al Nusra in Syria).
Like the terrorist groups Marie Colvin was sent to white wash as “heroic resisters” who kidnapped and butchered thousands of civilians. Colvin was killed here. Many thousands of people in Homs were slaughtered by those armed groups Colvin was a propagandist for.
Ah, but those days are gone. The bombs – mortars, suicide bombers, car bombs etc by the “rebels” ripping school children, shoppers, all the people apart, as well as the shelling by the legitimate army of the legitimate government of the sovereign nation of Syria in their efforts to defeat the terrorist proxies paid to destroy their country – are gone.
The kidnappings have gone. Gone are the days when you could be grabbed off the street and held for ransom. And while your family struggled to sell everything they had to pay the ransom, the “freedom fighters” would be torturing you. If your family couldn’t raise the money, well you’d be carved up and the pieces of your body left in the main roads.
Gone are the snipers, the “freedom and democracy” sharp shooters stationed in tall buildings who targeted people on the roads in cars and buses or trying to walk to work.
All gone. And so are the “real” journalists.
But the real story those real journalists are missing is here, right now, in Homs. That’s the story of what happened after the Syrian Army liberated this place.
Half the city’s buildings are gone and so are many of its people.
The ones who remain though, who have returned, who have worked so hard while suffering so much to revive their futures are the ones I’ve come to learn from in my beloved Homs.
To paraphrase the old antiwar song, “Where have all the flowers gone” here is my version:
Where have all the journos gone
Long time passing
Gone to sell the next war every one
When will they ever learn
When will they ever learn?
