As GOP candidates continue to play on the American electorate’s fear of ISIS, innocent Syrians in villages like Madaya continue to remain trapped.
By the time the convoy carrying food arrived, Sereen didn’t know how much more she and others in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya could endure.
She had skipped meals for months, she said, so that her young nieces and nephews could eat the family’s diminishing supplies of rice and bulgur. She watched as friends turned into walking skeletons.
Then, in recent weeks, people began dying.
First a neighbor died of starvation, followed by his 9-year-old son, she said. On Monday — the day that a U.N.-backed agreement temporarily lifted the Syrian government’s brutal blockade of the mountain hamlet — Sereen learned that a 60-year-old friend had died.