In Honor of The Victims

I am not going to get too into the politics of the Syrian raid. There are good arguments all around. Reports say that Syria had been making advancements in curbing fighters entering Iraq, they had been making efforts to for peace talks with Israel, and their government resources are spread too thin to curb the terrorist activities any more then they already have. They themselves have been victims of terrorist activities, such as a car bomb in Damascus that went off a month or so ago, killing 28. I believe the U.S. acted too fast and too aggressively.

But this post isn't about that.
This post is about the innocent victims who were claimed. Reports are conflicting. The official report from Syria is 3 men, four sons of one of the men, and a wife. Local reports claim 7 men and a woman. However, both reports agree that children were killed. According to http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.syria-news.com%2Freadnews.php%3Fsy_seq%3D84570&sl=ar&tl=en&hl=de&ie=UTF-8,
the victims are as follows:

Khalifa Ahmed (20 years)
Ali Abbas (50 years)
Mohammed Daoud al-Abdullah (50) and his four children:
Solomon ( 16)
Alyan (18)
Ibrahim (22)
Faisal (34)

It took me hours of searching online trying to find the names of everyone, especially the sons. I wanted to post this blog to honor their memory as civilians of this world, who were killed in a conflict that should not have killed them. The American public (and possibly other around the world), have gotten into the nasty habit of ignoring the victims. A victim without a name is just a statistic. Names too, especially Arab names, are easy for a Westerner to forget. Pictures, though, are unforgettable.





I cried for these victims, I honestly did. Especially the children. I didn't know any of these people, but I find myself mourning them all the same. If we had discovered that there was a prominent terrorist figure in an American city, would we raid our own country? Or would we use swat teams and special tatics forces who are trained to target the enemy and only the enemy. If this had happened in American, people would have been outraged if 7 civilians were killed in the pursuit of a criminal.
The purpose of this raid was to kill one prominent leader of a terrorist cell. Just one.
We killed him, but took 7 lives with him, possibly more. One one hand I know that if he hadn't been killed, his actions could have indirectly led to the death of hundreds of American and Iraqi soldiers. But in this raid, we killed 7 or more presumably innocents just to kill one guilty man.

Why?

Someone on a internet thread said "Thats just life. Sorry it didn't turn out the way your mommy promised."
I can understand the logic of that viewpoint, but I can't bring myself to believe it, or adopt it as my own viewpoint. I would like to, but I just can't. There is something very wrong with this whole situation, with this whole world, when we can shrug off the deaths of innocents without even bothering to honor them. Instead of shrugging it off, we should work to avoid such situations.

This is how I'm honoring them, in my own little way, in my own little niche that I've created in this vast internet.