Memorial for a city
Peace has come to Aleppo, the peace of the tomb. For 1617 days, people lived lives of bottomless dread as the worst fighting in Syria’s long-running civil war raged. The city has learned well the shameless games of man.
It’s a metropolis conditioned by division, the government held the West and rebels the East. Both have suffered. A roundabout patch of green in the West is choked with fresh graves, taking the overflow from the city’s cemeteries. The East is a chaos of shelled out buildings, their broken walls like ribs of a picked-at-beast.
Emerging from the wreckage of the East are the survivors. A quarter of a million people were trapped in the rebel-controlled area. They lived under intense bombardment from the air and terror on the ground. They had little food, water or medicine.