NATO's criminal war on Syria's widows and orphans has cost 400,000 lives to date, with millions more injured and displaced, both in government held Syria and further afield. The vast majority of those fatalities have been Syrian soldiers, their allies and Syrian civilians they were protecting against NATO's imported rebels and sundry Syrian Muslim Brotherhood gangbangers. The real reasons for this war include fortifying Israel's regional dominance, ripping open Russia's soft Muslim underbelly, emasculating and dissipating through ethnic cleansing the Shia crescent that stretches from India and Pakistan in the East to South Lebanon in the West as a viable economic, social and military asset, hawking NATO arms and weapons' systems to the Gulf State autocrats, ridding the region of Christians, Yezidi and other minorities NATO finds "troublesome" and using the resulting refugee flows as a cheap means of undermining European wage structures and of making an impoverished and emasculated Syria a vassal of NATO and its regional allies.