Media Discovers Syria Shells Syria, Skips Geopolitical Whys
The latest Al Jazeera piece highlights a video 'said to show' the Syrian army shelling a 'large weapons depot' in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud area, shared by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. (Because an army shelling an enemy’s weapons cache is, naturally, shocking.) What's conspicuously absent from this 'news' is any meaningful context of the Syrian civil war—or rather, the multi-national
proxy war. Where are the receipts on foreign-funded militias, the strategic interests of Turkey, the US, or even Qatar (from whom Al Jazeera is funded)? The Kurds, for their part, have long found themselves caught between various, often contradictory, allegiances. This isn't just 'Syrian army shelling'; it's another chapter in a decade-long saga of external powers using Syria as their geopolitical
chessboard, a detail often overlooked when the narrative aims to simplify. One might wonder why certain 'weapons depots' are filmed, and others, say, those supplied by external actors, are not.