Mosul, Iraq, July 20 – The embattled residents of this northwest Iraq city are certain that any day now, protesters in European capitals will take to the streets to call for the world to step in and stop the bloodshed in war-torn Iraq, because as the demonstrations against the Gaza war indicate, human rights are clearly the central value behind those protests.

Tens of thousands of human rights activists marched through various European cities such as London and Paris over the last week to decry Israel’s operation to end the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, chanting anti-Israel slogans, burning Israeli flags, comparing Israel’s defensive measures to Nazi genocide, and threatening or attacking local Jews. The beleaguered people of Iraq and Syria are certain that if the people of Europe can get so worked up over a few hundred Palestinians killed over the course of several weeks, there is no question they will make a similar effort to preserve the rights and dignity of the 170,000 Syrians killed in that country’s three-year-old civil war and of the 9,500 Iraqis killed in sectarian strife in 2013 alone.

“The concern that these activists show for the people of Gaza must mean that they will hold even larger, more effective protests for our sake,” said Aleppo resident Fatma Jibril, whose home was destroyed by a Syrian Air Force barrel bomb, killing her entire family and leveling the neighborhood. “I can’t wait to see what European politicians do in the face of the hundreds of thousands of marchers demanding that our human rights be defended. That should happen soon, right?”

Similar optimism pervades Egypt, where more than two thousand people have been killed over the last year and a half as the government battles Islamist militants. “Since it’s been more than a year that the Egyptian Army has basically held us prisoners in our own villages, destroyed our livelihoods, and taken away our able-bodied men, we can expect the activists calling for the protection of Palestinians to come to our aid as well, but with even more vehemence because our situation is so much more dire,” said Ali Aswan, a resident of the Sinai Peninsula.

“They must really want this demonstration to be a doozy,” he mused. “It’s been taking them years to put it together. That must be why we haven’t seen it until now.”

“It’ll be huge,” he concluded.