9 ms·

We live in Aleppo, here’s how we survive

64 points by redwood 10y ago

maxxxxx 10y ago
It's amazing what these people have to go through. I hope one day there will be an agreement that such bombings are not acceptable no matter who is doing the bombing.
- DKnoll 10y ago
  There is the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans cluster bombing outright, but conveniently neither Russia or Syria signed it. Even if they did, international treaties/law banning weapons tend to go out the window in times of war. Take white phosphorus for example, which is banned by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons for use as an incendiary weapon but has reportedly used by the US, Israel, Ukraine, Armenia, Taliban and Iraq under Saddam Hussein for such purpose. It's a mad world.
  - arjn 10y ago
    The saudis are also currently using cluster munitions against yemenis.
mstade 10y ago
This is such a tough read. :o(
- parthdesai 10y ago
  makes it worse when you see how beautiful Aleppo used to be. Makes me sick to stomach thinking what some humans are capable of doing for money.
pcardh0 10y ago
Thank God this is in the newspaper. Now Barack Obama will know about it. Maybe he can make a speech and end the war. I think there is a prize for that.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  Not just any newspaper, the Washington Post! > My wife and I are among about 250,000 people trapped here in the besieged eastern section of the city. Stopped reading right there.
  - seizethecheese 10y ago
    Why?
    - Gibbon1 10y ago
      Because after four years of war the number of people in Eastern Aleppo isn't even close to the pre-war population. The media says, 250,000 to 300,000. Probably more like a tenth that currently. Meanwhile there is 1 to 1.4 million people in Western Aleppo.
      - seizethecheese 10y ago
        Thanks for the reply. Were there 250-300K people living there before the war, or was this an estimate at some earlier point in the war?
        Gibbon1 10y ago
        I do not know. And I have no real first person information on Syria except for one friend who is half Syrian who has some family in Homs[1]. However I'm dubious about the 300,000 number since it just seems to be reflexively repeated for years. And because sounds like the number of people escaping Eastern Aleppo is a small trickle. Despite that it's barely a functioning city at this point. Also there is this. > While aid groups estimate anywhere from 175,000 to 300,000 people still live in eastern rebel-held Aleppo, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of figures from rebel territory. For example, Darayya, another besieged rebel-held city, was said to have more than 8,000 occupants. But last week, when government forces evacuated the entire town, they found fewer than 2,000 people still residing there. http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-aleppo-media-war-20160830-snap-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-aleppo-m... [1] And she of course knows little
StavrosK 10y ago
It's odd how posts like these can bring things in perspective for idle observers. Before reading this, war was something that happened "somehow". A building somewhere gets bombed, but there's no context, it might as well have been a building floating in nothingness. After reading this, you realize it's happening to people like you. One day, they were minding their own business, studying, going to work, doing everything you do, and the next their house got bombed and now they don't know whether they'll be alive next month. The world sucks.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  http://metatalk.metafilter.com/16524/History-from-a-witness http://metatalk.metafilter.com/16524/History-from-a-witness
meira 10y ago
It would work so well for them if they give up the western "Assad must go" motto. But they prefer to pick up some random kids and take photos, because they are ISIS and Al Nusra after all.
jwtadvice 10y ago
Quick aside to the fact that in Aleppo, Damascus, Kirkuk, and Daraa, and Mosul and that many other places in Syria and Iraq are horrible places to be. The situation in Syria as it stands today is complicated, sure. But it's also pretty easy to summarize why Aleppo and its outcome is important in the proxy war. Aleppo is a major population center and a "hub" in the spoke-and-hub network of cities and towns in Syria. When - and if - there is a political transition for the government of Syria, the forces that stand in Aleppo will have an outsized influence in the outcome. In this manner Aleppo has been an important battleground for the current administration in Damascus and the Russians who have national security interests in the secular government of Syria. For the same reasons the opposition - the rebel and terrorist forces in Syria - have been trying to take and hold Aleppo. The United States and Russia had been trying to broker a ceasefire, but ultimately the city's value to proxy forces and foreign backers proved too much and the mutual trust between great powers too little for a negotiation to be reached. Now that the ceasefire is off the table, the United States does not have a legal option for intervening. It has not ruled out - and may be engaged today in - covert illegal activity with respect to attacks on Syrian Government forces and infrastructure. On the other hand Russia was invited in by a government that is still internationally recognized and can intervene in Aleppo on a legal international basis. One option open to the United States is to try to intervene in Aleppo on account of a humanitarian basis, in which case it needs public opinion and material support to bolster a legal argument. This is the reason that the United States and its media companies have been focusing so much on the situation in Aleppo, narrating it as a particularly horrible instance of the civil war. The same sort of narrative campaign, it is easy to notice, is absent from reporting on Sanaa (Yemen), on the current operations in Mosul, of the Turkish (illegal?) military invasions of Greece and Iraq, of US bombing in Northern Syria, of Kabul and of military operations in Afghanistan, or of the mass innocent casualties in a number of places around the world from the Predator Drone mass assassination programme. Aleppo is a tragedy. Truly. The proxy war in Syria - and all of the regional and foreign power who have made it worse by pumping weapons and funding into it (including the US) - is a horror, and an acknowledgement that we still aren't at a place with our civilization where we can resolve tensions of competing international interest with rules, peace, diplomacy, and mutual benefit.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
jjawssd 10y ago
How exactly is this hacker news?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  4 downvotes and still zero explanation.
cloakandswagger 10y ago
Take a step back and you'll realize just how feverish the US media propaganda machine is right now re: Syria. Every day we have new pictures of bloodied/dead Syrian children, articles describing the horrors of war and frantic warnings of a genocide that could happen any day now. Now ask yourself: Why did you hear practically nothing about Syria for the past 4 years? Moreover, is anyone under the illusion that war isn't horrible? Did you think it was only strong, burly men getting killed before you saw that video of the kid in the ambulance? I'm not trying to take away from this story, but I also see it for what it is: manipulative propaganda being pushed by a country that has a proxy war to win. Finally, ask yourself this: Do you think all of the guns, bombs and technology we've provided to "freedom fighters" in Syria were only used to kill strong, burly men?
- mhermher 10y ago
  It's because SAA completed the encirclement of E Aleppo. You can pinpoint it to that event, just a few months ago. That is when all the hysteria started. To be fair, that encirclement is the worst thing to happen to the rebels in the entirety of the war. If they lose there, they have basically lost the war. It's happening, it will just trickle very slowly for the next few years. That is all unless there is stronger Western intervention (particularly by the US). The media campaign on Aleppo is just the war drums beating subtly to hopefully get the public behind a future intervention. Especially under a future Clinton admin. The coverage has been a disgrace though, hardly even acknowledging that the rebels in E Aleppo are overwhelmingly jihadists, fighting for an exclusionary Sunni theocracy.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Most of the coverage I've seen has been pretty neutral on the "rebels", choosing to focus instead on the immense collateral damage to noncombatants.
    - apsec112 10y ago
      Only the pro-rebel noncombatants. Now that rebel-held east Aleppo is surrounded, there are articles every day about how terrible it is and how many people are suffering. But when loyalist-held west Aleppo - which has at least four times the population - was surrounded in fall 2013, not a peep from anyone.
josu 10y ago
>After all that — the beatings, the airstrikes, the war, the bombings — I want to live in a free Aleppo. I want to stay here, where I was born, all my life. It’s my right. I really can't understand his reason to remain in Aleppo after 4 years of war. I could probably see his point at the beginning of the conflict, but once the war has been going on for such a long time, what is the point? He is playing Russian roulette every day; "It was an airstrike less than 100 meters behind ". Yes, the city is under siege, and currently it may be almost impossible to leave, but that doesn't seem to be his reason for staying.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Very similar to the people who had to be physically forced to evacuate during the recent floodings in the south of the US, because they felt that somehow they'd be okay. Humans tend to be very irrational in times of duress, particularly when sentimental things are at stake, like the house you raised your family in.
- meira 10y ago
  It is because he is a ISIS terrorist. He had his reasons.
bedros 10y ago
al nusra front, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda is controlling eastern aleppo. it's such a shame that washingtonpost is becoming the propaganda outlet for Al Qaeda. I personally know friends who've been suffering from Al Nusra front shelling their residential areas in Aleppo for the last three year; The majority of Aleppo residents are supportive of the Syrian gov and Russia finally, going after the terrorists; except for about 10% who are supportive of Al Qaeda and al nusra front. in the following video, a british journalist goes to Aleppo, and meets with people there, and you'll be shocked that the TRUTH is exact opposite of what propaganda outlet like WAPO, CNN, etc. want to spread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8mA0h7dCKI#t=255 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8mA0h7dCKI#t=255
danieltillett 10y ago
There are no good guys here, just various variation of bad. You just get to choose which bad guys you back. Personally I find it hard to believe that the USA is backing Al Qaida (or what ever they have decided to call themselves this week), but that is middle east politics for you.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Why is that hard to believe? The USA created Al Qaeda in our first foray into Afghanistan; they're literally blowback from training mujahedin to fight the Soviets.
  - nyolfen 10y ago
    this is a dishonest portrayal of events. the arab fighters in afghanistan were not supported by the US and were an extremely marginal presence to begin with. you could make a case for elements of the taliban having links to US support years prior to its establishment, but not AQ affiliates.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      the arab fighters in afghanistan were not supported by the US and were an extremely marginal presence to begin with. You mean, until we sent the CIA in to train them, fund them, and arm them with Stinger missiles?
      - nyolfen 10y ago
        we did not train, fund or arm the arab fighters. we trained, funded and armed local afghan mujahideen.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Even if the USA helped create Al Qaeda (rather controversial) I still find it hard to believe that anyone in the USA thinks it is a good idea to support them today.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
clarkmoody 10y ago
Foreign policy recommendations regarding the Middle East: 1) The only winning move is not to play.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  There is a cost to not playing the game, as Europe is in the early stages of discovering. Just like there was a cost to the US, to let Haiti go to hell, paid for in immigration. The difference is that Haiti is tiny, and the Middle East and North Africa are huge.
  - meric 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      There is a cost to playing, there is a cost to not playing; welcome to reality. At some point we've done so much damage for so long, that there is no real winning move left. Zugzwang.
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Here in Boston, we're paying the dreadful cost of letting Haiti go to hell. SOmetimes, I'm in a cab and the driver's confused about directions, and I HAVE TO SWITCH TO FRENCH! THE HORROR! Seriously, we could let them all in and they'd barely be noticed.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      My point is that a relatively tiny number of people couldn't be stopped, and a much much larger number of people in Europe's case certainly won't be. As you say though, the upside is that most people are just... people; average people. The downside is that it appears Europe is in the process of swinging hard to the Right in denial of reality.
meric 10y ago
I hope Al Qaeda capitulates quickly to reduce civilian casulties, the Syrian government forces capture the city and restore stable government.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ozgurozkan 10y ago
I am from Turkey and I am really uncomfortable about the situation in Middle East. I can pretty say that there is only one reality, children die. There is no second reality here.

64 points by redwood 10y ago

It's amazing what these people have to go through. I hope one day there will be an agreement that such bombings are not acceptable no matter who is doing the bombing.

DKnoll 10y ago
There is the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans cluster bombing outright, but conveniently neither Russia or Syria signed it. Even if they did, international treaties/law banning weapons tend to go out the window in times of war. Take white phosphorus for example, which is banned by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons for use as an incendiary weapon but has reportedly used by the US, Israel, Ukraine, Armenia, Taliban and Iraq under Saddam Hussein for such purpose. It's a mad world.
- arjn 10y ago
  The saudis are also currently using cluster munitions against yemenis.

mstade 10y ago

This is such a tough read. :o(

parthdesai 10y ago
makes it worse when you see how beautiful Aleppo used to be. Makes me sick to stomach thinking what some humans are capable of doing for money.

pcardh0 10y ago

Thank God this is in the newspaper. Now Barack Obama will know about it. Maybe he can make a speech and end the war. I think there is a prize for that.

Gibbon1 10y ago
Not just any newspaper, the Washington Post! > My wife and I are among about 250,000 people trapped here in the besieged eastern section of the city. Stopped reading right there.
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  Why?
  - Gibbon1 10y ago
    Because after four years of war the number of people in Eastern Aleppo isn't even close to the pre-war population. The media says, 250,000 to 300,000. Probably more like a tenth that currently. Meanwhile there is 1 to 1.4 million people in Western Aleppo.
    - seizethecheese 10y ago
      Thanks for the reply. Were there 250-300K people living there before the war, or was this an estimate at some earlier point in the war?
      - Gibbon1 10y ago
        I do not know. And I have no real first person information on Syria except for one friend who is half Syrian who has some family in Homs[1]. However I'm dubious about the 300,000 number since it just seems to be reflexively repeated for years. And because sounds like the number of people escaping Eastern Aleppo is a small trickle. Despite that it's barely a functioning city at this point. Also there is this. > While aid groups estimate anywhere from 175,000 to 300,000 people still live in eastern rebel-held Aleppo, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of figures from rebel territory. For example, Darayya, another besieged rebel-held city, was said to have more than 8,000 occupants. But last week, when government forces evacuated the entire town, they found fewer than 2,000 people still residing there. http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-aleppo-media-war-20160830-snap-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-aleppo-m... [1] And she of course knows little

StavrosK 10y ago

It's odd how posts like these can bring things in perspective for idle observers. Before reading this, war was something that happened "somehow". A building somewhere gets bombed, but there's no context, it might as well have been a building floating in nothingness. After reading this, you realize it's happening to people like you. One day, they were minding their own business, studying, going to work, doing everything you do, and the next their house got bombed and now they don't know whether they'll be alive next month. The world sucks.

jacobolus 10y ago
http://metatalk.metafilter.com/16524/History-from-a-witness http://metatalk.metafilter.com/16524/History-from-a-witness

meira 10y ago

It would work so well for them if they give up the western "Assad must go" motto. But they prefer to pick up some random kids and take photos, because they are ISIS and Al Nusra after all.

jwtadvice 10y ago

Quick aside to the fact that in Aleppo, Damascus, Kirkuk, and Daraa, and Mosul and that many other places in Syria and Iraq are horrible places to be. The situation in Syria as it stands today is complicated, sure. But it's also pretty easy to summarize why Aleppo and its outcome is important in the proxy war. Aleppo is a major population center and a "hub" in the spoke-and-hub network of cities and towns in Syria. When - and if - there is a political transition for the government of Syria, the forces that stand in Aleppo will have an outsized influence in the outcome. In this manner Aleppo has been an important battleground for the current administration in Damascus and the Russians who have national security interests in the secular government of Syria. For the same reasons the opposition - the rebel and terrorist forces in Syria - have been trying to take and hold Aleppo. The United States and Russia had been trying to broker a ceasefire, but ultimately the city's value to proxy forces and foreign backers proved too much and the mutual trust between great powers too little for a negotiation to be reached. Now that the ceasefire is off the table, the United States does not have a legal option for intervening. It has not ruled out - and may be engaged today in - covert illegal activity with respect to attacks on Syrian Government forces and infrastructure. On the other hand Russia was invited in by a government that is still internationally recognized and can intervene in Aleppo on a legal international basis. One option open to the United States is to try to intervene in Aleppo on account of a humanitarian basis, in which case it needs public opinion and material support to bolster a legal argument. This is the reason that the United States and its media companies have been focusing so much on the situation in Aleppo, narrating it as a particularly horrible instance of the civil war. The same sort of narrative campaign, it is easy to notice, is absent from reporting on Sanaa (Yemen), on the current operations in Mosul, of the Turkish (illegal?) military invasions of Greece and Iraq, of US bombing in Northern Syria, of Kabul and of military operations in Afghanistan, or of the mass innocent casualties in a number of places around the world from the Predator Drone mass assassination programme. Aleppo is a tragedy. Truly. The proxy war in Syria - and all of the regional and foreign power who have made it worse by pumping weapons and funding into it (including the US) - is a horror, and an acknowledgement that we still aren't at a place with our civilization where we can resolve tensions of competing international interest with rules, peace, diplomacy, and mutual benefit.

BurningFrog 10y ago

jjawssd 10y ago

How exactly is this hacker news?

jjawssd 10y ago
4 downvotes and still zero explanation.

cloakandswagger 10y ago

Take a step back and you'll realize just how feverish the US media propaganda machine is right now re: Syria. Every day we have new pictures of bloodied/dead Syrian children, articles describing the horrors of war and frantic warnings of a genocide that could happen any day now. Now ask yourself: Why did you hear practically nothing about Syria for the past 4 years? Moreover, is anyone under the illusion that war isn't horrible? Did you think it was only strong, burly men getting killed before you saw that video of the kid in the ambulance? I'm not trying to take away from this story, but I also see it for what it is: manipulative propaganda being pushed by a country that has a proxy war to win. Finally, ask yourself this: Do you think all of the guns, bombs and technology we've provided to "freedom fighters" in Syria were only used to kill strong, burly men?

mhermher 10y ago
It's because SAA completed the encirclement of E Aleppo. You can pinpoint it to that event, just a few months ago. That is when all the hysteria started. To be fair, that encirclement is the worst thing to happen to the rebels in the entirety of the war. If they lose there, they have basically lost the war. It's happening, it will just trickle very slowly for the next few years. That is all unless there is stronger Western intervention (particularly by the US). The media campaign on Aleppo is just the war drums beating subtly to hopefully get the public behind a future intervention. Especially under a future Clinton admin. The coverage has been a disgrace though, hardly even acknowledging that the rebels in E Aleppo are overwhelmingly jihadists, fighting for an exclusionary Sunni theocracy.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Most of the coverage I've seen has been pretty neutral on the "rebels", choosing to focus instead on the immense collateral damage to noncombatants.
  - apsec112 10y ago
    Only the pro-rebel noncombatants. Now that rebel-held east Aleppo is surrounded, there are articles every day about how terrible it is and how many people are suffering. But when loyalist-held west Aleppo - which has at least four times the population - was surrounded in fall 2013, not a peep from anyone.

josu 10y ago

>After all that — the beatings, the airstrikes, the war, the bombings — I want to live in a free Aleppo. I want to stay here, where I was born, all my life. It’s my right. I really can't understand his reason to remain in Aleppo after 4 years of war. I could probably see his point at the beginning of the conflict, but once the war has been going on for such a long time, what is the point? He is playing Russian roulette every day; "It was an airstrike less than 100 meters behind ". Yes, the city is under siege, and currently it may be almost impossible to leave, but that doesn't seem to be his reason for staying.

GuiA 10y ago
Very similar to the people who had to be physically forced to evacuate during the recent floodings in the south of the US, because they felt that somehow they'd be okay. Humans tend to be very irrational in times of duress, particularly when sentimental things are at stake, like the house you raised your family in.
meira 10y ago
It is because he is a ISIS terrorist. He had his reasons.

bedros 10y ago

al nusra front, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda is controlling eastern aleppo. it's such a shame that washingtonpost is becoming the propaganda outlet for Al Qaeda. I personally know friends who've been suffering from Al Nusra front shelling their residential areas in Aleppo for the last three year; The majority of Aleppo residents are supportive of the Syrian gov and Russia finally, going after the terrorists; except for about 10% who are supportive of Al Qaeda and al nusra front. in the following video, a british journalist goes to Aleppo, and meets with people there, and you'll be shocked that the TRUTH is exact opposite of what propaganda outlet like WAPO, CNN, etc. want to spread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8mA0h7dCKI#t=255 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8mA0h7dCKI#t=255

danieltillett 10y ago

There are no good guys here, just various variation of bad. You just get to choose which bad guys you back. Personally I find it hard to believe that the USA is backing Al Qaida (or what ever they have decided to call themselves this week), but that is middle east politics for you.

M_Grey 10y ago
Why is that hard to believe? The USA created Al Qaeda in our first foray into Afghanistan; they're literally blowback from training mujahedin to fight the Soviets.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  this is a dishonest portrayal of events. the arab fighters in afghanistan were not supported by the US and were an extremely marginal presence to begin with. you could make a case for elements of the taliban having links to US support years prior to its establishment, but not AQ affiliates.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    the arab fighters in afghanistan were not supported by the US and were an extremely marginal presence to begin with. You mean, until we sent the CIA in to train them, fund them, and arm them with Stinger missiles?
    - nyolfen 10y ago
      we did not train, fund or arm the arab fighters. we trained, funded and armed local afghan mujahideen.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Even if the USA helped create Al Qaeda (rather controversial) I still find it hard to believe that anyone in the USA thinks it is a good idea to support them today.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

clarkmoody 10y ago

Foreign policy recommendations regarding the Middle East: 1) The only winning move is not to play.

M_Grey 10y ago
There is a cost to not playing the game, as Europe is in the early stages of discovering. Just like there was a cost to the US, to let Haiti go to hell, paid for in immigration. The difference is that Haiti is tiny, and the Middle East and North Africa are huge.
- meric 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    There is a cost to playing, there is a cost to not playing; welcome to reality. At some point we've done so much damage for so long, that there is no real winning move left. Zugzwang.
- ocschwar 10y ago
  Here in Boston, we're paying the dreadful cost of letting Haiti go to hell. SOmetimes, I'm in a cab and the driver's confused about directions, and I HAVE TO SWITCH TO FRENCH! THE HORROR! Seriously, we could let them all in and they'd barely be noticed.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    My point is that a relatively tiny number of people couldn't be stopped, and a much much larger number of people in Europe's case certainly won't be. As you say though, the upside is that most people are just... people; average people. The downside is that it appears Europe is in the process of swinging hard to the Right in denial of reality.

meric 10y ago

I hope Al Qaeda capitulates quickly to reduce civilian casulties, the Syrian government forces capture the city and restore stable government.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ozgurozkan 10y ago

I am from Turkey and I am really uncomfortable about the situation in Middle East. I can pretty say that there is only one reality, children die. There is no second reality here.