The truth behind the lion of al-Ghouta
Only few days ago, an image of a slaughtered lion started circulating on social media, looking at it for the first time, I wondered if It was done out of pure sarcasm as some tweeted :
“Haha, we are slaughtering Al Assad!!”
Nevertheless, we managed to dig a bit deeper and find out the truth behind the photo.
As mentioned in most of the tweets on Twitter: “People slaughter lion to eat in Ghouta (Lion found in al-Qarya al-Shamya Zoo).” For those of you who don’t know, al-Ghouta is one of the largest suburbs in Damascus, which is divided into two parts: East Ghouta and West Ghouta. East Ghouta has been under siege for a year now, and the Syrian Regime managed to cut off all resources by closing main highways, thus, besieging the Syrian town. According to activists, the siege worsened (in April 2013) when the regime managed to block the main military road which connects East Ghouta to the North.
East Ghouta is now relying on its stocks of seeds, its agriculture and the farms to feed its 2 million inhabitants. A dear friend from East Ghouta described the situation as follows: “If it wasn’t for Al Ghouta’s trees, plants, fruits and farms, we would be facing a terrible humanitarian disaster now, yet the situation is still bad. Medication is missing, we have few meals a day, sometimes only one for each person, and we have dozens of injuries to treat daily.”
In conclusion, the photo circulating on social media could be explained in the following ways:
The men could have “mercy killed” a sick lion because of the lack of medication; they could also be using its coat of fur because temperatures have decreased. However, slaughtering a lion for the sake of eating it is not the case in al-Ghouta (at least that is what al-Ghouta residents have asserted): “We don’t need to consume lion meat, nor cat meat. YES, we are hungry and suffering from the lack of resources, but whoever is trying to advertise for our humanitarian crisis surely did it wrong using lions, cats and donkeys.”
لنک