Wars are such extreme events that they are hard to imagine for people not living through them.
They emerge slowly, a million fraught moments converging, but they always seem sudden. When war descends, everything changes, fear looms over everything. It’s a state of being that people living in peace cannot fully grasp.
The names of prominent Syrian cities like Aleppo, Damascus and Homs have been said so often in the news that they sound like frightening omens. But beyond their echoes of violence, these cities often mean little to people who are unfamiliar with the country.
Throughout the world, there seems to be a disconnect between knowledge and emotional awareness.
The brutal atrocities of the war are known. The fragmented, chaotic nature of the war is known. The mass displacement of people by the war is known. But still, the war seems foreign. Still, it seems like it’s happening elsewhere. Still, it seems impossible.
But it is happening and it is ruining the lives of millions of people. If the war was happening elsewhere, what would that look like? What would the toll look like if it happened in the US, for example?
Clearly, the conditions that caused the war in Syria--mainly an oppressive dictator and regional instability--are not present in the US, but the thought experiment helps to clarify the scale of Syria’s suffering.
An estimated 470,000 people have died during the Syrian Civil War. Proportionally speaking, the US would have lost 6.6 million in a similar 5-year war.
The corollaries of Aleppo, Damascus and Homs in the US are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Imagine if these cities were hit by barrel bombs and precision missiles on a daily basis and if militias and government forces roamed the streets, instituting daily curfews, shooting up buildings and executing dissenters.
Imagine if protesters in Union Square holding signs and chanting slogans were gunned down and tortured like they were gunned down and tortured in the squares and streets of Aleppo and Damascus.
Imagine if the luxury stores along Fifth Avenue were bombed into lumps of cement and shards of glass, huge craters scooping out what used to be sidewalks, dust coating the air. Imagine if all the Starbucks and juice shops, all the gyms and office buildings were clobbered into shells as people sat at desks and tables.
Imagine if across the Brooklyn Bridge, rebel militias plotted attacks in abandoned warehouses and brownstone buildings. If huge caches of weapons were fueling night-time raids on Manhattan.
Imagine if all access to New York was cut off, highways blockaded, airports occupied and ports controlled.
Imagine if water no longer ran from faucets, electricity was cut off and all the shelves in all the grocery stores were stripped bare, forcing people to filter the city’s grimy rivers and barter for food.
Imagine if all the schools were shut down and all the city’s children watched and waited in fear as neighbors and family members were abused and killed.
In some parts of Syria, people have been reduced to eating grass for sustenance.
Syria has lost approximately $255 billion USD from the war. The US would have lost $92 trillion from a proportionally devastating war (Syria's last GDP measurement in peacetime was $40 billion USD; the US's last GDP measurement was $16.7 trillion USD).
Around 11.2 million people are displaced in Syria. 4.6 million of the displaced are refugees, seeking safety in neighboring Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and also in Europe.
If a similar war occurred in the US, about 159 million people would be displaced, fleeing from suburbs and cities, avoiding key highways, walking for hundreds or thousands of miles and scrambling for food and water. Roughly 65 million people would be refugees, seeking safety in Canada, Mexico and throughout Latin America.
Imagine if, instead of providing relief, these countries closed their borders and corralled US refugees into cramped, resource-deprived holding camps, where they were criticized for using cell phones to contact relatives and wearing clothes that helped them maintain dignity.
None of these things will happen to the people of the US. But all of these things have happened to the people of Syria.