To allow the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo to be so pulverised and more importantly its people subjected to relentless attack in all manner of ways, food shortages and deprivation of medical aid - to name but a few things - is nothing short of scandalous. Imagine if this was happening in and to a Western city. The outcry! The UN and all so-called civilised States stand severely condemned for their inaction and watching a tragedy unfold.
"The unnamed man shown on CCTV (go to link here) standing in a sunny courtyard and fiddling with his phone, could be any one of us whiling away a few minutes of the day.
Except that, in the city where this moment played out a few weeks ago, any notion of the ordinary has been turned on its head.
One second, the man is simply standing alone and looking down. The next, the wall behind him explodes and all trace of him is obliterated in a violent, catastrophic air strike that destroys everything around him.
To many in the comfort of the West, the battle for Aleppo might seem like an abstract story of a faraway city, where statistics do little to portray the suffering amid the violence.
But, for people such as Mohamed Abu Rajab, a cardiologist at the M10 hospital where that air strike occurred on October 1, it is intensely personal.
Dr Abu Rajab sent Fairfax Media a link to the video to demonstrate what is happening in Aleppo, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, which, just five years ago, was the economic heart of Syria.
The eastern part of the city could be completely wiped out by Christmas, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, warned last month. The scale of the human tragedy there is so great it risks becoming "another Rwanda", he said, and the conscience of the world is being tested.
"If we miss some type of opportunity to make a change, history will judge us," he said."
"The unnamed man shown on CCTV (go to link here) standing in a sunny courtyard and fiddling with his phone, could be any one of us whiling away a few minutes of the day.
Except that, in the city where this moment played out a few weeks ago, any notion of the ordinary has been turned on its head.
One second, the man is simply standing alone and looking down. The next, the wall behind him explodes and all trace of him is obliterated in a violent, catastrophic air strike that destroys everything around him.
To many in the comfort of the West, the battle for Aleppo might seem like an abstract story of a faraway city, where statistics do little to portray the suffering amid the violence.
But, for people such as Mohamed Abu Rajab, a cardiologist at the M10 hospital where that air strike occurred on October 1, it is intensely personal.
Dr Abu Rajab sent Fairfax Media a link to the video to demonstrate what is happening in Aleppo, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, which, just five years ago, was the economic heart of Syria.
The eastern part of the city could be completely wiped out by Christmas, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, warned last month. The scale of the human tragedy there is so great it risks becoming "another Rwanda", he said, and the conscience of the world is being tested.
"If we miss some type of opportunity to make a change, history will judge us," he said."
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