A hard-hitting new campaign claims that if the Syrian Civil War was taking place in Britain, London would be abandoned while everyone in the town of Reading, which has a population of over 150,000, would be dead.
The online international campaign, called “If We Were Syrian”, was created by two Canadian journalists who spell out exactly what would happen if the conflict in Syria were transposed to G7 countries.
They also claim that New York City would be deserted if the conflict were taking place in the U.S., while inhabitants would have fled Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and Dortmund if it happened in Germany.
In France, everyone in Cannes would be dead, while all of Italy’s 12 largest cities would be abandoned.
“Since we can’t fathom the scale of the crisis, we’re not doing enough about it–not opening our borders enough, and not giving enough aid,” the journalists say on their website.
“This campaign is a call to humanize staggering levels of death and displacement,” they add, “which can be difficult to imagine anyway, but especially difficult to imagine from a vantage point of relative wealth and safety.
“By understanding what the numbers of the dead and displaced in Syria actually represent, hopefully we’ll be moved to offer the same support to Syrian people that we’d expect the world to offer us if our countries were in the midst of what may become the largest humanitarian crisis in modern times.”
The website adds that in the UK, Liverpool and Sunderland would also be deserted, with 6.5 million people fleeing to Scotland, Wales and the Midlands, while another 2.8 million would register as refugees in Ireland. Every primary and nursery school student in England would have also been either been killed or forced to flee their home.
“The Syrian humanitarian crisis… has ballooned to such mammoth proportions that there’s no excuse not to act,” the site’s creators add.
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