.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Syrians leave eastern Ghouta with their belongings for regime-held areas. Airstrikes have broken up the enclave.: photo by Omar Sanadiki/Reuters, 15 March 2018
The fight for Syria has become an intractable tussle for regional power and influence that has led to a direct clash between Russian backed forces and the US military for the first time since the Cold War, as well as clashes between Iran and Israel, Syria and Israel, and Turkey and the Kurds.
The forces that have been unleashed are looking increasingly difficult to suppress. And each stakeholder seems reluctant to look past its own interests to see the danger ahead.
None of this matters to Syria’s 15,000 newest refugees who left their homes in Ghouta on Thursday and crossed into the unknown. Many feared retribution from a state that has remained avowedly hostile through the past five years of blockade and bombardment.
Others feared an even worse fate: the vengeance of a regime that has grown accustomed to impunity – licensed by an international order that has done little to stop it.
Syria’s war without restraint has dashed any meaningful talk of reconciliation, for now. Grievances, among both vanquished and victors, remain deep and unaddressed.
How to put the country back together again is not a priority for those still burying their young, or pitching new tents in unfamiliar lands. And nor does it matter to those fighting new wars over an already ravaged land.
“Bashar al-Assad said in 2012 that if the war continues there would be no peace from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic,” said Mohammed Atwan, a refugee from Homs living in Idlib. “It was a threat. And it’s come true.”
![]()
Syrians leave eastern Ghouta for regime-held areas. Airstrikes have broken up the enclave.: photo by Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images, 15 March 2018
An opposition counterattack in Hamouriyah reclaimed some neighbourhoods on Thursday night. However, a sense of resignation hung over other parts of the enclave that had been central to the opposition’s stand against the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad.
The protest movement that erupted on 15 March 2011 was underpinned by a class struggle, with the ranks of the original rebel groups largely comprised of the country’s working poor. Ghouta, 15 minutes’ drive from the presidential palace, had defied multiple attempts to retake it, as the rebel strongholds of Homs, Aleppo and Zabadani fell.
It was first hit by airstrikes in late 2012, then devastated by a massive sarin attack in August 2013, which killed more than 1,300 people, and was linked by the UN, UK, US and France to the Syrian military.
Ghouta locals said they feared Syrian officials would wreak revenge on them if they were forced to cross into regime-controlled territory, and the impunity that has characterised the conflict would mean there would be no retribution for any forced disappearances.
![]()
Syrian children wait to be evacuated from eastern Ghouta. The UN said they have suffered psychological ruin.: photo by Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images, 15 March 2018
The US national security adviser, HR McMaster, blamed Russia and Iran for the deaths and said they should both pay a political and economic price for their support of the Assad regime.
McMaster said Russian bombers conducted more than 20 sorties a day against eastern Ghouta, while Moscow had impeded aid deliveries and international investigations into Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his people.
Speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, McMaster claimed that over the past six years, Tehran had provided more than $16bn (£11.5bn) to the regime and transported foreign Shia militias and weapons to Syria.
“It is time to impose serious political and economic consequences on Moscow and Tehran,” said McMaster, whose position is widely believed to be under threat, in part because of his tough stance towards Russia.
The fall of Ghouta would leave Idlib province as the final major opposition stronghold in Syria. Home to more than 2.6 million people, at least 1 million of them displaced or forcibly transferred from elsewhere in the country, Idlib is a volatile mix of populations and militant groups.
Up to 15,000 extremists aligned to al-Qaida have held sway over much of the area for the past three years. However, they have been forced from many of their strongholds by attacks from opposition groups in recent weeks.
Ali Deeb, a Ghouta student, said: “We don’t want to go to Idlib. “We’re only just coming to terms with what is happening here. Somebody has to help us, surely.”
![]()
![]()
Suddenly on the Mission lawn
A guy tosses a frisbee catching sun glints
Into the vermilion jaws of dusk
While above the frayed palms
A great sherry party takes place in the western sky
With catering by Giambattista Tiepolo
Eternity is in that moment
As if the sun were going down over Venice
And there one stood, maestro di pintore,
Calculating the finishing touches
Instead of only off Goleta
TC: Off Goleta, from Under The Fortune Palms (1982)![]()
Angelica Carving Medoro's Name on a Tree: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1757, fresco, 320 x 160 cm (Villa Valmarana ai Nani, Vicenza)
Ron Padgett: Prayer to Saint Thecla, 2017
![Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken]()
Ron Padgett: The Art of Bliss
![Tiepolo_Palacio_Real_Glory_of_Spain_detail2 | by Monicalev]()
![File:Nelumno nucifera open flower - botanic garden adelaide2.jpg]()
Flower of Nelumbo nucifera, Botanic Garden, Adelaide, South Australia: photo by Peripitus, 2008
![File:Cyanistes caeruleus 3 Luc Viatour.jpg]()
Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus): photo by Luc Viatour, 2008
![]()
Fields of Sawdust (Bolinas): photo by Beatrice Murch, 15 September 2007
![]()
To the #UN Security Council to intervene and save 400 a man and if it can evacuation of civilians ... victims in the streets and under the ruins of buildings destructive and no one can transferred to the hospital in #EasternGhouta... call for all the world moved, save the rest: image via Amer almohibany @amer_almohibany, 11:55 PM 14 March 2018
![]()
SYRIA - More than 1,180 civilians have been killed since regime forces on February 18 launched an air and ground assault on the enclave Eastern Ghouta Photo @amer_almohibany: image via Frederique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 14 March 2018
SYRIA - More than 1,180 civilians have been killed since regime forces on February 18 launched an air and ground assault on the enclave Eastern Ghouta Photo @amer_almohibany: image via Frederique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 14 March 2018
A call for distress ... a massacre of thousands of civilians now in Hmouriyeh in #EasternGhouta Stop #GhoutaGenocide: image via Amer almohibany @amer_almohibany, 3:14 PM 14 March 2018
SYRIA - More than 1,180 civilians have been killed since regime forces on February 18 launched an air and ground assault on the enclave Eastern Ghouta Photo @amer_almohibany @AFP: image via Amer almohibany @amer_almohibany, 3:23 AM 14 March 2018
Syrians leave eastern Ghouta with their belongings for regime-held areas. Airstrikes have broken up the enclave.: photo by Omar Sanadiki/Reuters, 15 March 2018
Civilians without hope, a leader without a country: call this a victory? Assad claims he has restored sovereignty to Syria, but grievances remain deep for both vanquished and victors: Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent, The Guardian, 15 March 2018
The beginning of the end for Ghouta came first with a trickle. Desperate, hungry and scared, Syria’s newest displaced people walked a journey into the unknown, past Russian military police, towards loyalist soldiers who started checking names.
The same anxious ritual of the vanquished had been carried out before, in Homs, Aleppo, Qusair and most other places in the country, where seven years ago today the first spasms of open defiance began to rattle its ruthless rulers.
Those heady early years of insurrection are long gone now. Anticipation has been replaced by resignation, hope subsumed by fear.
The empowered Syrian street that had once exposed the fragility of a regime long thought omnipotent has retreated to the rubble. Splintered and battered, the anti-Assad opposition inspired by the protests can no longer win the war.
The state, too, is a shadow of what it was when popular uprising gave way to insurgency. Unable to hold its ground, Syria’s leadership seconded its defence to Russia and Iran, who have clawed its military to a winning position, destroying much of the country in the process, and regularly striking deals with factions without informing their patron.
Bashar al-Assad’s claim to have restored sovereignty has left him like the emperor without a proverbial thread.
Across Syria, the clean battlelines of early on have been replaced many times over, as the war has metastasised like no other conflict in the past 50 years. A national military, a shadow army, Islamists, jihadists, proxies, regional heavyweights and global powers are all deeply embedded, trying to shape the conflict to suit their interests.
Whoever prevails in what remains of Syria will achieve a pyrrhic victory.
All the while, a civilian population has been battered, brutalised, killed and displaced, leaving an international order that was supposed to prevent the repeat of last century’s devastation looking paralysed and impotent.
More than 500,000 people have been killed as the war enters its eighth year, with no obvious end in sight. Across the country, towns and cities have been laid to ruin.
Coexistence has been shredded, a generation of children have been deprived of education and at least half the population is dependant on aid.
How to put Syria back together again may be on the wishlists of its backers, but nothing tangible can be done while two thirds of the country’s population remain too scared to return home.
The same anxious ritual of the vanquished had been carried out before, in Homs, Aleppo, Qusair and most other places in the country, where seven years ago today the first spasms of open defiance began to rattle its ruthless rulers.
Those heady early years of insurrection are long gone now. Anticipation has been replaced by resignation, hope subsumed by fear.
The empowered Syrian street that had once exposed the fragility of a regime long thought omnipotent has retreated to the rubble. Splintered and battered, the anti-Assad opposition inspired by the protests can no longer win the war.
The state, too, is a shadow of what it was when popular uprising gave way to insurgency. Unable to hold its ground, Syria’s leadership seconded its defence to Russia and Iran, who have clawed its military to a winning position, destroying much of the country in the process, and regularly striking deals with factions without informing their patron.
Bashar al-Assad’s claim to have restored sovereignty has left him like the emperor without a proverbial thread.
Across Syria, the clean battlelines of early on have been replaced many times over, as the war has metastasised like no other conflict in the past 50 years. A national military, a shadow army, Islamists, jihadists, proxies, regional heavyweights and global powers are all deeply embedded, trying to shape the conflict to suit their interests.
Whoever prevails in what remains of Syria will achieve a pyrrhic victory.
All the while, a civilian population has been battered, brutalised, killed and displaced, leaving an international order that was supposed to prevent the repeat of last century’s devastation looking paralysed and impotent.
More than 500,000 people have been killed as the war enters its eighth year, with no obvious end in sight. Across the country, towns and cities have been laid to ruin.
Coexistence has been shredded, a generation of children have been deprived of education and at least half the population is dependant on aid.
How to put Syria back together again may be on the wishlists of its backers, but nothing tangible can be done while two thirds of the country’s population remain too scared to return home.
Belying claims that the war is losing steam is the stark figure that more than 6,500 people were newly displaced each day last year.
The fight for Syria has become an intractable tussle for regional power and influence that has led to a direct clash between Russian backed forces and the US military for the first time since the Cold War, as well as clashes between Iran and Israel, Syria and Israel, and Turkey and the Kurds.
The forces that have been unleashed are looking increasingly difficult to suppress. And each stakeholder seems reluctant to look past its own interests to see the danger ahead.
None of this matters to Syria’s 15,000 newest refugees who left their homes in Ghouta on Thursday and crossed into the unknown. Many feared retribution from a state that has remained avowedly hostile through the past five years of blockade and bombardment.
Others feared an even worse fate: the vengeance of a regime that has grown accustomed to impunity – licensed by an international order that has done little to stop it.
Syria’s war without restraint has dashed any meaningful talk of reconciliation, for now. Grievances, among both vanquished and victors, remain deep and unaddressed.
How to put the country back together again is not a priority for those still burying their young, or pitching new tents in unfamiliar lands. And nor does it matter to those fighting new wars over an already ravaged land.
“Bashar al-Assad said in 2012 that if the war continues there would be no peace from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic,” said Mohammed Atwan, a refugee from Homs living in Idlib. “It was a threat. And it’s come true.”
Syrians leave eastern Ghouta for regime-held areas. Airstrikes have broken up the enclave.: photo by Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images, 15 March 2018
Besieged enclave of Ghouta on brink of falling to Syrian regime: About 15,000 people flee opposition area seven years since protests that led to war: Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent, Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul and Julian Borger in Washington, The Guardian, 15 March 2018
The Syrian opposition enclave of Ghouta is on the brink of falling to regime forces, three weeks into a relentless air blitz and seven years to the day since the first stirrings of anti-regime protests, which went on to spark nationwide insurrection, then a devastating war.
Up to 15,000 people had fled from the town of Hamouriyah by nightfall on Thursday into regime-held areas, their exit aided by Syrian and Russian forces who had besieged them throughout much of the conflict, their defiance withering as another bloody anniversary was marked.
Airstrikes and ground assaults have split Ghouta into three areas. Those who remained in the enclave on the eastern edges of Damascus on Thursday were trying to secure guarantees of safety from Russian officials.
The exodus was expected to continue through the night and for the rest of the week, marking the beginning of the end for the most important opposition stronghold in Syria, and allowing the Syrian regime and its allies to eventually claim control of most of the capital.
The probable fall of Ghouta has left the international community scrambling to come up with arrangements for how to feed and house the people it believes may still be in the area, possible as many as 400,000.
Syria has become a war of numbers, all of which make for numbing reading. Nearly two-thirds of its pre-war population are internally displaced or have fled into neighbouring countries. More than 500,000 people have been killed, more than 100,000 people remain under arrest or forcibly disappeared, most of them in government prisons, and a generation of children have faced what the UN describes as psychological ruin.
The death toll in Ghouta is thought to be above 1,500, with many victims still buried under rubble. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened by bombing that has regularly been labelled indiscriminate and merciless.
Aid agencies had pleaded to be allowed to deliver food and medicine to populations that Syrian and Russian officials claimed were led by terrorist groups. The same militants were on Thursday attempting to broker terms of a civilian evacuation and their eventual departure.
A doctor from Ghouta said many local people remained unsure of what to do. Few appeared to trust guarantees of safe passage that were being offered by the same troops who had bombed them intensely since mid-February.
“As doctors, we will continue our work,” said a physician.
“We are from this community. If they remain here, we will stay here. If they choose something else, we will reassess our choices.
“They are taking town after town and everything has been burned. It is systematic destruction that is meant to bring down the entire area on the heads of its residents. There is no place to flee to. People are scared of a slaughter.”
Like other Ghouta residents contacted by the Guardian, the doctor asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from regime officials if he decided to flee. A local journalist also declined to put his name to his words.
“Today, there are civilian movements that are demanding at the very least for the United Nations to guarantee the evacuation of these families,” he said.
“The thousands who left the central part of eastern Ghouta are doing so without any guarantees, to regime areas, and no UN organisation can oversee them. They are in areas controlled by the regime.”
Mahmoud Bwedany, a student, said: “What will happen … other than the violation of human rights and forced displacement, is they will take the military-age youth to the army and they’ll arrest whoever is on their wanted list. The scene makes you weep. We need someone to stand up to the regime and Russia.”
Up to 15,000 people had fled from the town of Hamouriyah by nightfall on Thursday into regime-held areas, their exit aided by Syrian and Russian forces who had besieged them throughout much of the conflict, their defiance withering as another bloody anniversary was marked.
Airstrikes and ground assaults have split Ghouta into three areas. Those who remained in the enclave on the eastern edges of Damascus on Thursday were trying to secure guarantees of safety from Russian officials.
The exodus was expected to continue through the night and for the rest of the week, marking the beginning of the end for the most important opposition stronghold in Syria, and allowing the Syrian regime and its allies to eventually claim control of most of the capital.
The probable fall of Ghouta has left the international community scrambling to come up with arrangements for how to feed and house the people it believes may still be in the area, possible as many as 400,000.
Syria has become a war of numbers, all of which make for numbing reading. Nearly two-thirds of its pre-war population are internally displaced or have fled into neighbouring countries. More than 500,000 people have been killed, more than 100,000 people remain under arrest or forcibly disappeared, most of them in government prisons, and a generation of children have faced what the UN describes as psychological ruin.
The death toll in Ghouta is thought to be above 1,500, with many victims still buried under rubble. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened by bombing that has regularly been labelled indiscriminate and merciless.
Aid agencies had pleaded to be allowed to deliver food and medicine to populations that Syrian and Russian officials claimed were led by terrorist groups. The same militants were on Thursday attempting to broker terms of a civilian evacuation and their eventual departure.
A doctor from Ghouta said many local people remained unsure of what to do. Few appeared to trust guarantees of safe passage that were being offered by the same troops who had bombed them intensely since mid-February.
“As doctors, we will continue our work,” said a physician.
“We are from this community. If they remain here, we will stay here. If they choose something else, we will reassess our choices.
“They are taking town after town and everything has been burned. It is systematic destruction that is meant to bring down the entire area on the heads of its residents. There is no place to flee to. People are scared of a slaughter.”
Like other Ghouta residents contacted by the Guardian, the doctor asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from regime officials if he decided to flee. A local journalist also declined to put his name to his words.
“Today, there are civilian movements that are demanding at the very least for the United Nations to guarantee the evacuation of these families,” he said.
“The thousands who left the central part of eastern Ghouta are doing so without any guarantees, to regime areas, and no UN organisation can oversee them. They are in areas controlled by the regime.”
Mahmoud Bwedany, a student, said: “What will happen … other than the violation of human rights and forced displacement, is they will take the military-age youth to the army and they’ll arrest whoever is on their wanted list. The scene makes you weep. We need someone to stand up to the regime and Russia.”
An opposition counterattack in Hamouriyah reclaimed some neighbourhoods on Thursday night. However, a sense of resignation hung over other parts of the enclave that had been central to the opposition’s stand against the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad.
The protest movement that erupted on 15 March 2011 was underpinned by a class struggle, with the ranks of the original rebel groups largely comprised of the country’s working poor. Ghouta, 15 minutes’ drive from the presidential palace, had defied multiple attempts to retake it, as the rebel strongholds of Homs, Aleppo and Zabadani fell.
It was first hit by airstrikes in late 2012, then devastated by a massive sarin attack in August 2013, which killed more than 1,300 people, and was linked by the UN, UK, US and France to the Syrian military.
Ghouta locals said they feared Syrian officials would wreak revenge on them if they were forced to cross into regime-controlled territory, and the impunity that has characterised the conflict would mean there would be no retribution for any forced disappearances.
Syrian children wait to be evacuated from eastern Ghouta. The UN said they have suffered psychological ruin.: photo by Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images, 15 March 2018
All 11 attempts to sanction the Syrian government at the UN security council have been blocked by Russia and China.
Plaintive demands by UN officials that civilian populations be spared from bombing have been routinely ignored and Syria’s health and education systems have been systematically targeted.
Plaintive demands by UN officials that civilian populations be spared from bombing have been routinely ignored and Syria’s health and education systems have been systematically targeted.
The US national security adviser, HR McMaster, blamed Russia and Iran for the deaths and said they should both pay a political and economic price for their support of the Assad regime.
McMaster said Russian bombers conducted more than 20 sorties a day against eastern Ghouta, while Moscow had impeded aid deliveries and international investigations into Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his people.
Speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, McMaster claimed that over the past six years, Tehran had provided more than $16bn (£11.5bn) to the regime and transported foreign Shia militias and weapons to Syria.
“It is time to impose serious political and economic consequences on Moscow and Tehran,” said McMaster, whose position is widely believed to be under threat, in part because of his tough stance towards Russia.
The fall of Ghouta would leave Idlib province as the final major opposition stronghold in Syria. Home to more than 2.6 million people, at least 1 million of them displaced or forcibly transferred from elsewhere in the country, Idlib is a volatile mix of populations and militant groups.
Up to 15,000 extremists aligned to al-Qaida have held sway over much of the area for the past three years. However, they have been forced from many of their strongholds by attacks from opposition groups in recent weeks.
Ali Deeb, a Ghouta student, said: “We don’t want to go to Idlib. “We’re only just coming to terms with what is happening here. Somebody has to help us, surely.”
A child sleeps in a bag in the village of Beit Sawa, eastern Ghouta, Syria Photo Omar Sanadiki: image via Reuters Pictues @reuterspictures, 15 March 2018
A little Tiepolo
The Wind (detail): Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1743-50, fresco (Palazzo Labia, Venice)
Off Goleta
Suddenly on the Mission lawn
A guy tosses a frisbee catching sun glints
Into the vermilion jaws of dusk
While above the frayed palms
A great sherry party takes place in the western sky
With catering by Giambattista Tiepolo
Eternity is in that moment
As if the sun were going down over Venice
And there one stood, maestro di pintore,
Calculating the finishing touches
Instead of only off Goleta
TC: Off Goleta, from Under The Fortune Palms (1982)
Angelica Carving Medoro's Name on a Tree: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1757, fresco, 320 x 160 cm (Villa Valmarana ai Nani, Vicenza)
Ron Padgett: Prayer to Saint Thecla
I’d like to have a little Tiepolo
(Gian Battista) in my apartment,
Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken, for example,
but the Met wouldn’t lend it to me.
I want its pale pinks and blues
swirling up into the air as I fall asleep,
as if bliss existed.
Ron Padgett: Prayer to Saint Thecla, 2017
Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1758-59, oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Ron Padgett: The Art of Bliss
Maybe I should not allow the word end
Ron Padgett: The Art of Bliss, 2017
to come at the end of the line
only to be followed in the next by
with, just as I allowed the line
“as if bliss existed” to end
my last poem, where it sounds
like an attempt at a big finish
and it’s not easy to say out loud,
and in fact as I wrote it
the word heaven tussled with bliss
for that slot in the sentence
but gave up when it realized
it was too much like blue
and so flew back into the dictionary
while bliss settled down
the way the name Bliss Pond
settled into the nearby body of water
and stayed that way,
as if Bliss Pond existed.
Ron Padgett: The Art of Bliss, 2017
Tiepolo_Palacio_Real_Glory_of_Spain_detail2: image by Monica Levinsky, 17 May 2017
Bliss Pond | Foliage and reflections at Bliss Pond (VT): photo by jwalkr4, 2 October 2012
Bliss Pond | Foliage and reflections at Bliss Pond (VT): photo by jwalkr4, 2 October 2012
Bliss Pond | Foliage and reflections at Bliss Pond (VT): photo by jwalkr4, 2 October 2012
Every Day
Flower of Nelumbo nucifera, Botanic Garden, Adelaide, South Australia: photo by Peripitus, 2008
Grammar tells us
what kind of an object
anything is. So does light.
“Thought
is surrounded
by a
halo…”
You can feel yourself thinking
but can you think yourself feeling?
A state of what?
“You’re a smarty pants
do you want to dance?”
Touch is important
in a dark universe,
but print is useless
much less unreal
Mechanical Tao
The robot pushes small obstacles out of the
way, goes round heavy ones, and avoids slopes.
The BIG crayon
for little fingers
Where is it written
that we must write
right side up?
Advantage –
ah, it stays with us
past the asking
Are we
some kind
of filter, some
diode
it’s all being
run through?
I am here with this (my mind, etc.)
“I am not here with my mind”
Learning to forget
occurring in the instant,
uneasily wise
& so, poorly aware
Space isn’t
in Language –
or as the child cries
“Outside! Outside!”
I walk in
on occasion
One room fronts on
open, unqualified spaces.
The other is bound
by a wall. All its
area is thought up.
mind
lines
Around
nouns
people are
nervous,
possessive
People on television
give you their
public self
like people
on elevators
“What has the greatest importance
is not the twelve tones, but,
much more, the serial conception…”
More hair
every
day
(1970)
Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus): photo by Luc Viatour, 2008
Every Day
Fields of Sawdust (Bolinas): photo by Beatrice Murch, 15 September 2007
Awake the mind's hopeless so
At a quarter to six I rise
And run 2 or 3 miles in
The pristine air of a dark
And windy winter morning
With a light rain falling
And no sound but the pad
Of my sneakers on the asphalt
And the calls of the owls in
The cypress trees on Mesa Road
And when I get back you're
Still asleep under the warm covers
Because love is here to stay
It's another day and we're both still alive
(1973)
At a quarter to six I rise
And run 2 or 3 miles in
The pristine air of a dark
And windy winter morning
With a light rain falling
And no sound but the pad
Of my sneakers on the asphalt
And the calls of the owls in
The cypress trees on Mesa Road
And when I get back you're
Still asleep under the warm covers
Because love is here to stay
It's another day and we're both still alive
(1973)
Entrance to Duxbury Reef, Bolinas: photo by Beatrice Murch, 22 January 2008