The difference in the news media coverage of East Ghouta versus Afrin looks a whole lot like Aleppo versus Mosul.

Do you remember the rhetoric about Aleppo and Russia?

#Aleppo is joining Rwanda and Srebrenica as defining historical events that embody evil. #Assad, #Russia, #Iran know no shame. — Samantha Power (@AmbPower44) December 13, 2016

people of Aleppo wish to inform you that tomorrow they will be killed with their families https://t.co/ghIBaSQRI8 — Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) December 13, 2016

“To everyone who can hear me: We are here exposed to a genocide in the besieged city of Aleppo,” she said. “This may be my last video. More than 50,000 of civilians who rebelled against the dictator al-Assad are threatened with field executions or dying under bombing.”

It sounds absolutely horrific, and it was.



The government assault has been backed by heavy artillery fire and air strikes, with at least 463 civilians, including 62 children, killed in eastern Aleppo since mid-November, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Now let's look at Mosul.

230 innocent civilians were killed in Mosul in a single night from U.S. bombs. The American media barely noticed.

It's not like we were responsible. Those hundreds of dead women and children were “human shields” for ISIS snipers, so it was their fault.



That would be an awful lot of human shields, of course, and there wouldn’t be much point of stashing them inside buildings where the US forces clearly either didn’t know where they were or didn’t feel it amounted to a deterrent to bombing those buildings anyhow.

So many civilians are being killed by U.S. bombs that Air Force Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler had to publicly deny that our bombing weren't "indiscriminate".

So when we bomb hospitals and slaughter civilians while "liberating" Mosul, it's "tragic".

It doesn't get much attention in the U.S. press, but Iraq has managed to solve their prison population problem - they don't take prisoners.



The major scoffs at claims made by some Iraqi soldiers that the jails in Baghdad were already too full to take any more IS prisoners.

"It's not true, we have plenty of prisons, but now we are not treating the prisoners like we did before," he says. "Earlier in this war, we arrested a lot of Daesh and brought them to the intelligence services. But now, we make very few arrests."

More than 40,000 are feared dead in Mosul, a number that dwarfs the destruction of east Aleppo.

Using this equation: 500 civilians killed by Assad and Russia is greater than 40,000 civilians killed by the U.S. and its allies.

We can see something like this ratio in the coverage of East Ghouta and Afrin.

East Ghouta:



The Syrian news agency SANA said more than 10,000 had escaped from the town of Hamoriya to government-controlled parts of the Syrian capital. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) put the figure at more than 12,500.

Afrin:



More than 150,000 people have been displaced in the last few days from Syria’s Afrin town, a senior Kurdish official and a monitoring group said on Saturday.

So 10,000 refugees in one case, and 15 times as many in another case.

Guess which one Washington is outraged about? Guess which one caused the U.S. to threaten military action?

To be fair, roughly twice as many civilians have been killed in East Ghouta than in Afrin (500 vs. 280), but the fighting is almost over in East Ghouta, while the urban fighting in Afrin has just started.

As for the news media, they are playing the exact same tune.

Eastern Ghouta is another Srebrenica, we are looking away again

Syria regime threatens Eastern Ghouta with more genocide

When I did a search for "Afrin genocide" the results were a lot more sparse, although I did find this.



Syrian Arab militiamen leading the Turkish attack on Afrin in northern Syria are threatening to massacre its Kurdish population unless they convert to the variant of Islam espoused by Isis and al-Qaeda. In the past such demands have preceded the mass killings of sectarian and ethnic minorities in both Syria and Iraq. In one video a militia fighter flanked by others describes the Kurds as “infidels” and issues a stark warning, saying "by Allah, if you repent and come back to Allah, then know that you are our brothers. But if you refuse, then we see that your heads are ripe, and that it's time for us to pluck them." Though the Kurds in Afrin are Sunni Muslims, Isis and al-Qaeda traditionally punish those who fail to subscribe to their beliefs as heretics deserving death. “The video is 100 per cent authentic,” said Rami Abdulrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which released it, in an interview with The Independent.

Uh, excuse me?

Let me get this straight.

We are prepared to look the other way while our Kurdish allies in Syria are massacred by former ISIS and al-Qaeda jihadists?

In some cases we even support it.

In East Ghouta we abhor the government attack on an al-Qaeda-held enclave.

Something is seriously wrong here.



Mr Abdulrahman, who is the leading human rights monitor in Syria with a network of informants throughout the country, says he is worried that international attention is entirely focused on the Syrian army assault on Eastern Ghouta and “nobody is talking about” the potential slaughter of the Kurds and other minorities in Afrin.

Mr Abdulrahman points to growing evidence drawn from videos taken by themselves of militiamen claiming to be members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the units advancing ahead of regular Turkish troops are extreme jihadis. This has previously been asserted by a former Isis member in an interview published by The Independent last month who said that many of his former comrades had been recruited and retrained by the Turkish military. He said that Isis recruits had been instructed by Turkish trainers not to use their traditional tactics, such as the of extensive use of car bombs, because this would identify them as terrorists.