About 110 armed conflicts are raging across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe as we start the new year.
Each one of these wars is a stain on our humanity.
Geopolitical war games as defined by leaders who believe they are “strongmen” and “strongwomen” make it unlikely that any of these conflicts will end soon.
The war machine is too well-oiled, too lucrative and too many of us have become too hardened to care about the rising number of civilian casualties across the world.
But how can we justify our complicity in the increasingly frequent deliberate and targeted killing of the world’s children?
We may dehumanise them, skip over images of their suffering, tell ourselves that killing children “over there” does not matter, it does not turn us into monsters.
But it does. The blood on our hands will not be washed away.
The threat of ‘total economic war’ looms. And July sees highest civilian deaths since 2022 (Ukraine Battlefield update, Day 1,616)
Shada Islam