A Syrian Crisis
Joshua Liao
You
might have seen images on the news or on the cover of time magazine, depicting
Middle Eastern looking people with exhausted or sad expressions on their faces.
However, most of us move on without taking a moment to consider what the images
are about. After all, those people are not in America and there’s very little
that we can do to help them. That much is true. But it is still important to
understand this issue that is currently one of the world’s largest and hottest
topics: the European Immigration crisis. To begin, Syria has been engulfed in a
civil war that has gone on for almost four years now, with pro-democracy rebels
fighting against the al-Assad regime. As the country has been torn apart by
war, many Syrians have left, fleeing due to the destruction and persecution.
The destruction, of course, has come from the war. The religious persecution
comes from a group that you’re sure to have heard of: the Islamic State in
Syria otherwise known as ISIS. The immigrants begin a journey that will last
thousands of miles into Europe, where they hope to regroup and start a new
life. Now just take a moment to put yourself in the immigrants shoes. You’re
living a normal, routine life one day, when all of a sudden you receive news
that a peaceful democracy protest has turned violent and war breaks out across
your neighborhood. After a couple years of surviving bombs and fires, the
situation has become too dangerous and you now have to pack up and leave the
place where you grew up. You don’t even know where you are going, just that it
will take a long time to get there. That is the situation that millions of
Syrians are facing as they leave their country. They flee to European nations
that are already overwhelmed with millions of other migrants. There are camps
set up for the migrants to stay in, but they are overcrowded and dangerously
short on supplies and medical aid. People are dying everyday, yet the efforts
to help them are barely noticed due to the massive amounts of people that need
attention. It is hard to imagine that so many people in the world are suffering
so much, yet others know so little about their predicament. With this
background, the next time you see a news article or a CNN report covering the
crisis, take a moment to listen, to see what new developments are going on.
There might just be some way that you can help.
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