Aleppo at War: Everyday Life in the Death Zone

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/civil-war-makes-life-a-struggle-in-aleppo-in-northern-syria-a-887265.html



Buildings burst in a hail of exploding shells, killer shrapnel tears through the air. Around the next corner, bakers work while children comb through debris for corpses. That's Aleppo today -- a city where death is part of everyday life.

Aleppo at War: Everyday Life in the Death Zone
By Kurt Pelda in Aleppo, Syria
March 06, 2013 – 06:00 PM

In Aleppo, every footstep is a crunch. The streets are strewn with rubble and broken glass from destroyed buildings and shattered windows. It's a sound that distinguishes a walk around this war-torn Syrian town from any other city in the world.

~snip~

If you want to survive in this city gone mad you watch out for flying metal and rubble. If an aerial bomb explodes in the area, people stay under shelter for at least 10 seconds afterwards -- that's how long it takes for the debris hurled into the air from the crater to come raining down, often over a distance of hundreds of meters, with deadly force.

It takes longer for the grey dust from the explosions to settle. It comes from pulverized buildings. The victims of aerial attacks are often coated in fine dust from head to foot. It leaves them looking ashen even before the color of life has seeped from their faces.

Shelling by artillery and bombings from aircraft are such common everyday occurrences in Aleppo now that people don't let it stop them go about their lives -- provided the explosions are far enough away. When the bombs start falling close by, there's chaos and fury -- at President Bashar Assad and his air force, but also at the rebels, for whose presence Assad is exacting revenge on the civilian population. Once the fighter jets have turned away, magnesium flares continue to burn in the sky trailing white smoke. The magnesium is intended to distract heat-seaking missiles from the engines of the jets.

[leveymg]

1. The plan appears to be to carve up Syria and give Aleppo to the Salafist militias in the north

under cover of a NATO no-fly zone (a point underscored in this particularly one-sided article) while also slicing off the border areas in the south nearest Israel and Jordan, and handing that over to western-backed militias as custodians.

In other words, Syria is going to be turned into a giant Beirut. What could go wrong?