Homs lies destroyed.
I remember thinking, as many Syrians did, that Bashar Al-Assad would not dare to do anything comparable to his father's ravaging of the city of Hama in 1982. With smartphones, social media and the eyes of the world watching, how could he? We were wrong.
Homs, a city of 1 million, is now devastated, with most of its residents long having fled the violence, eking out a miserable existence at the mercy of hostile governments in neighbouring countries. You only have to type the city's name in Google for a litany of images of a ghost town, with not a single building intact or undamaged.
We thought Assad would not dare, because we were under the erroneous impression that the outside world, however you would define it, would not tolerate it, yet tolerate it they did.
I'm sure many Syrians feel the same as me, as if I'm screaming in the dark. The apathy, the denials, the outright lies all stick in my throat and my rage and bitterness is without end. I could post a thousand pictures of dead babies, abandoned cities, aerial bombardment on Facebook without a flicker of interest. Yet as soon as I change my profile picture, 50 likes and 50 comments. I apologise for the profanity, but fuck your mothers.
Syria is the cradle of civilization. We are descended from those who helped bring light to a once dark world, and we deserve better than this. Is it because we are now Arabs or Muslims, cursed from birth with the disdain of Western capitals and peoples? Or is our suffering inconvenient in that it may force you to actually do something about it, and so you ignore it?
