General

Aleppo has been under siege for about a hundred days. Food stocks are running out. Price are up 20-fold. Medical and civil defence equipment destroyed by regime and Russian bombing cannot be replaced. The injured are sent home without even painkillers and the dead are carried to graveyards on food carts.

Parachutes have been used by the Russian and Syrian air forces to drop bombs, such as the parachute-retarded ODAB-500PM, on civilian areas of the besieged city. Parachutes could be used to send urgently needed food and medical aid instead.

Khero Dawood, a local civil society activist who decided to stay in Aleppo when the siege was being completed, told an incident he witnessed that describes a lot of what those staying in eastern Aleppo are going through now. Translated below is a social media post by Khero that tells a story of depopulation, destruction, collapse of the health system, and a bitter sense of abandonment.

‘Yesterday at around 1.30 am, I was walking with two people in the streets of the Tareeq al-Bab district which have become empty of everything except destruction.We heard moaning, talking, and then screaming.

The destruction is so complete that it obliterates even a sense of time, writes New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman about a video of Aleppo. At a glance, the video shot from a drone could show Berlin in 1945 or Grozny, 2000. Mass death erases all distinctions.  The place is  the Mashhad district, or what remains of it after recent attacks by Syrian government forces and their Russian allies. Toppled rooftop satellite dishes, choked by plaster dust, resemble wilted flowers. Figures move through the pulverized rubble but are hard to make out.

Every now and then, the conflict in Syria produces an iconic image of horror and suffering, which many brandish as an undisputable truth that will finally shake the world into “doing something”. Others break down at the sight of such images, or instinctively avert their senses. Mass killings and disappearances, industrial-scale torture and sexual abuse, gruesome staged executions, starvation tactics, the continued use of chemical weapons, napalm, cluster and barrel bombs, not to forget the torments of desperate emigration – all have spawned morbid emblems of their own.

Peter Harling, one of the foremost analysts of Syrian politics and the founder of Synaps, is a member of the advisory panel of the Shattuck Center on Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery.

“It is time to define it [urbicide] more precisely as the deliberate destruction of urban life beyond anything that might be justified by military necessity as a way to erase identity and expel populations. It is also time to make it a crime,” argue Robert Templer and AlHakam Shaar in a recent article about the urbicide taking place in Aleppo. Shaar and Templer predict that Aleppo will survive the current onslaught – as it has survived “centuries of disasters from earthquakes to plagues of mice, from the collapse of empires to shifts in the routes of global trade” – and that when it does states and the international community have a responsibility to help Aleppo rebuild. “We have failed to protect the Syrian people; we should not fail them again when it comes to reconstruction.”

You can read the full text of the article in the August 2016 issue of TVERGASTEIN – Interdisciplinary Journal of the Environment here.

This news item is reposted courtesy of SPP Communications Office. Original post: here.