http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/gho ... 21086.html
But these armed groups are curiously absent when we express our outrage at the carnage in Ghouta. There are no Western reporters to interview them – because we (though we don’t usually say so) would have our heads chopped off by these defenders of Ghouta if we tried or even dared to enter the besieged suburb. And the footage which we receive shows – incredibly – not a single armed man. This does not mean that the wounded or the dead children or the bloodied corpses – albeit with faces “blurred” by our own thoughtful television editors – are not real or that the film is fake. But the footage clearly does not show all of the truth. The cameras – or their film editors – do not depict the al-Nusrah fighters who are in Ghouta. Nor are they going to.
Earlier archive film of sieges – of Warsaw in 1944, of Beirut in 1982, of Sarajevo in 1992 – show the actual fighters who were defending these cities, along with their weapons. But footage from Ghouta – like almost all the film from eastern Aleppo – contains not a frame of acknowledgement that these armed men exist. Nor have I come across a single mention of them in our commentaries of civilian suffering, save for passing references to Ghouta in the US and European media as “rebel-held”. Who, then, killed by mortar fire the six civilians — 28 were wounded — in the centre of government-controlled Damascus 24 hours ago? A tiny percentage of the Ghouta dead, to be sure. But were they done to death by ghosts?
