The photo of 3-year old Aylan Kurdi, drowned on a Turkish beach, elicited declarations of concern from media around the world. Aylan’s brother Galip, 5, and their mother Rehanna died in the same incident. After four years of civil war in Syria, we were told, the horrific photograph would awaken the world’s powers to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and Iraq.

Don’t bet on it. Four million Syrians have been forced by war to flee into neighboring countries, out of a total pre-war population of some 22 million, with 10 million more displaced internally. Atrocities have proliferated, from the gasoline-loaded barrel bombs dropped on civilian neighborhoods by the minions of dictator Bashar al-Assad to the ghastly public mass executions committed by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). The campaign by the ultra-Wahhabis of ISIS to destroy pre-Islamic cultural monuments of which they disapprove has also continued.