Stunning Drone Footage Depicts Syria's Dying Capital
In late October, we brought you what we called “haunting” drone footage of the devastation in Syria, where five years of bloody conflict has cost the country both its population and its cultural heritage.
“The civil war has been going on four years. What is now left of Syria?,” Die Presse asked President Bashar al-Assad in a December interview.
“If they talk about the infrastructure, much of it is destroyed,” Assad responded.
“Every day you can hear the shelling, even here in Damascus, quite close to us,” Die Presse continued, underscoring the extent to which the country’s crumbling capital is still under siege from rebels.
Below, find new drone footage of the hollowed out city courtesy of RT followed by excerpts from “The Slow Death of Damascus,” as originally published in Foreign Policy.
* * *
From "The Slow Death of Damascus," by Thanassis Cambanis
Over the course of a recent 10-day visit, Damascus residents said they feel less embattled than they did a year ago, but the war is still an inescapable reality of everyday life. Every night, dozens of mortars still land in the city center, sending wounded and sometimes dead civilians to Damascus General Hospital. From the city’s still-busy cafés, clients can hear the thuds of outgoing government guns and the rolling explosions of the barrel bombs dropped on the rebel-held suburb of Daraya.
Army and militia checkpoints litter the city. In some central areas, cars are stopped and searched every two blocks. Still, rebels manage to smuggle car bombs into the city center. According to residents, explosions occur every two or three weeks, but are rarely reported in the state media.
Workplaces across the country have emptied out over the summer, as Syrians with a few thousand dollars to spare risked the trip to Europe via Turkey and a boat ride to Greece, taking advantage of a newly permissive Syrian government policy to issue passports quickly and without question.
Employees in government offices, international aid organizations, and private Syrian corporations estimated that anywhere between 20 and 50 percent of their coworkers left the country this summer.
“The government doesn’t care if people leave. It can’t stop them,” one middle-class Syrian, who has chosen so far to remain in Damascus, said of the exodus. “The war seems like it will go on forever. People see no future for their children. The only people who are staying are the ones who have it really good here or the ones who aren’t able to leave.”
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Mission Accomplished
Yes. Quite lovely. I remember a Anthony bourdain episode there, years ago it was a pile of rubble. http://hedgeaccordingly.com/2015/12/syria-isil-oil-fields-pounded-by-bri...
Those poor Syrians their city looks like Detriot!
I'm ashamed that I have a bank account.
< Looks better than Detroit.
< Looks the same or worse than Detroit.
All for a Saudi Pipeline - Fuck the USA
jack offs who have been to detroit don't acert things like that.
Because, Detroit is not in the bible as far as I am able to tell.
No it is not. The giant fuckers who wrote that work of fiction did not know about places that are beyond the stench of their crusted assholes.
....and there was no Detroit in those days.
This is all in our names.
No wonder this election is about "outlaws, outsiders" given what these psycho bastards
have done. At the state of the union the black congress traitors oozed over the oily Obama
idolizing his black skin color.
Disgusting, revolting, terrifying if I were not a spiritual being who knows this shit is just
purification by fire for all of us I would go insane.
Will they call Syria a holocaust? Or Libya, Iraq?
No they will call a rounding up of fucking Jew criminals and finally putting them to work in Germany a holocaust.
I'm interested in your idea that this is "purification by fire for us all." Care to go in depth?
http://biblehub.com/isaiah/17-1.htm
The Greater Israel Project success continues.
2 million plus people killed, thanks Jews, you truly are God's Chosen People.
The world was once destroyed by a flood. The next worldwide destruction will be by fire.
Purification by fire is also a hopi prophesy http://theshamanictimes.com/hopi-indigenous-prophecies-2012-the-great-pu...
"I would go insane"
You are there already.
" if I were not a spiritual being who knows this shit is just"
yes, you are a spiritual being, indeed.
because, you know, all wise and spiritual people espouse hatred and violence towards others who are different skin colors and different religions.
though you did state contempt for blacks and for jews, you left out your hatred of muslims, that wasn't spiritual at all of you.
"you left out your hatred of muslims"
Its cuz they are the newly micro-aggressed group. One can stick an iron rod up any Christian-black-jooo-white-male ass and bar b que them over a open fire in the town square while screaming about global warming but by jeepers you better not say anything derogatory about a muslim! Dammit!...lol.
And now this refugee sexual and rapping Germans drama so that to shut the refugees sympathizer's mouth. What is the difference between this and throwing babies out of incubators?
It gets worse. Now the Neocons, a prime mover in this war crime and humanitarian disaster, are whining that "neocons" don't really exist and that the term neocon is anti-semitic: http://antiwar.com/blog/2016/01/06/neocons-at-national-review-stop-calli...
So what is the reason for what's so flared their nostrils? Their emo butthurt from being painted correctly as neocons now leaves them with a permanent condition leaky ass?
Whining is cracking up because their cheap lies and propaganda have lost charm.
Are they knowing people wake up to fraudulous term "anti-semitic", that Syria, Lebanon, Hezbolla all are semitic?
Can expect when they deduce the above these pigs squeal at a large emery prints, rolled in a tube with an abrasive outside and pushed in their work-worn anus.
Neocohens, then?
This is the fucking US Obama, Clinton, Israeli democracy.
These people must be tried as war-criminal!
Neocons Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld are Semites? I didn't know that?
Might explain why they didn't go after their Semite cousins -- the Saudis -- after 9/11. And why they invaded Kuwait and Iraq.
None of those men are "neocons" - they are militarists, surely, but did not adhere to the philosophy or strauss nor does their foreign policy distill to proxy zionism
"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than “conservative”) Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It’s a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren”. The neoconservative apologist Murray Friedman explains that Jewish dominance within his movement by the inherent benevolence of Judaism, “the idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, place” (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, 2006).
Just as we speak of the “Christian Right” as a political force in the United States, we could also therefore speak of the neoconservatives as representing the “Jewish Right”. However, this characterization is problematic for three reasons. First, the neoconservatives are a relatively small group, although they have acquired considerable authority on and within Jewish representative organizations, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. In 2003, journalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times counted twenty-five members saying, “if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened”. The neoconservatives compensate for their small number by multiplying their Committees, Projects, and other think tanks, which certainly give them a kind of ubiquity.
Second, the neoconservatives of the first generation mostly came from the left, even the extreme Trotskyist left for some such as Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary. During the late 1960s the Commentary editorial staff begins to break with the liberal, pacifist left, which they suddenly find decadent. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, was a militant anti-Vietnam dissenter until 1967, but then in the 70s became a fervent advocate of an increased defense budget, bringing the journal along in his wake. In the 1980s, he opposed the policy of détente in his book The Present Danger: in the 1990s, he calls for the invasion of Iraq, and then again in the early 2000s. In 2007, while his son John Podhoretz was taking over as editor of Commentary, he asserted once again the urgency of a U.S. military attack, this time against Iran.
Third, unlike evangelical Christians who openly proclaim their unifying religious principles, neoconservatives do not display their Judaism. Whether they’d been Marxists or not, they appear mostly non-religious. It is well-know that their major influence is the philosophy of Leo Stauss, so much so that they are sometimes referred to as “the straussians”; Norman Podhoretz and his son John, Irving Kristol and his son William, Donald Kagan and his son Robert, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky, to name just a few, all expressed their debt to Strauss. Leo Strauss, born to a family of German Orthodox Jews, was both pupil and collaborator of political theorist Carl Schmitt, himself a specialist of Thomas Hobbes and advocate of a “political theology” by which the State must appropriate the attributes of God. Schmitt was an admirer of Mussolini, and the legal counsel of the Third Reich. After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, it was Schmitt who provided the legal framework that justified the suspension of citizen rights and the establishment of the dictatorship. It was also Schmitt, in 1934, who personally obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation a grant for Leo Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in London and Paris, and then finally end up teaching in Chicago."...
http://www.voltairenet.org/article178638.html
Leo Strauss: The Political Philosopher as a Young ZionistWhat crap is this? This article except for substitute drone footage for images melodramatic is repeation of article posted 7 weeks ago this site.
News of Syria does not lack, reruns do not need. Could easily tell that Syrian Arab Army since two days now a significant victory at Salmaa.
http://syrianperspective.com/2016/01/huge-victory-for-syrian-army-in-lat...
https://z5h64q92x9.net/proxy_u/ru-en.ru/colonelcassad.livejournal.com/25...
(This link is yandex from Russian to English translated.)
But hey, if rerun article, can rerun the comment. At least it not multiple times daily rerun of crap posts net.kook spammer MrNosey. So rerun below:
Do not forget cheap propaganda. The US is king of it.
Good example is this article. The author misrepresents the situation in a typical US way.
Funny. Barrel bomb is the cheap propaganda giveaway. When you see this term you may quite assured rest that the author is telling cheap US propaganda. Barrel bomb is just a simple bomb. It has outer case made of a barrel and is dropped from helicopter. No more destructive than US bombs designed to explode people at weddings and funerals.
Dropped from the air would subsume it under the category airstrikes, so why depict it differently? Cheap US propaganda.
Again a distinction without reason, except the US propaganda style guide tells to always bring up barrel bombs.
This article is so much dishonest in this regard it can only outline how duplicity is the US trademark.
Excellent information provided by Ziad on Syrianprospective , everyone on zerohedge needs to read his blog to get a full idea as to how ridiculous, sick, and propaganda filled the US and vassal media is, the true level of hatred toward the US/UK, and how powerful the Russian military really is because Russia is pulling this off - they are fucking the US neocons in the ass and then some, the Empire of Exceptionalist Bullshit is in its death rows - its for the good of the world, FUCK THE USA
Thanks BB for the link to syrianperspective!
I learn something new here every day...
Having said that, ZH could stand to do a better job of sourcing this kind of info rather than regurgitating Western lies...
"Syrian civil war"?! Really?
yeah bruthah, and I be 'shamed of havin' da ebt account...gold toof peepses...getcho' greels on...
I never thought I'd say it but it's actually worse.
Way worse.
"This message came to me concerning Damascus: 'Look, Damascus will disappear! It will become a heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer will be deserted. Sheep will graze in the streets and lie down unafraid. There will be no one to chase them away. The fortified cities of Israel will also be destroyed, and the power of Damascus will end. The few left in Aram will share the fate of Israel's departed glory,' says the Lord Almighty"
Hard to argue with this.. bible is right again
End of days . The word is not blind luck when it appears correct
Hard not to think of the "asylum seekers" as locusts.
Bush was doing God's work!
More depleted uranium!!! Jesus wouldn't have revealed DU if he hadn't intended us to weaponize the substance.
How 'Christian' of you!
If it looks like a duck..... Christians embrace the truth, which in todays world is often quite ugly. One can forgive the sinner while being disgusted by the sins.
Hope it comes to a yank town near you shitheads.
We the People live in towns like you. The SHITHEADS live in DC....
Moar "Change you can beleive in" from the DroneMaster, Soweto.
He had a point to be pissed and say that, ypu know. Most Americans have been cheering on genocide for nearly 20 years now. At minimum 20 years of glorified genocide. They celebrate war, death and imposing their will upon othets with horrific violence. Why should they expect to be spared? I thought you loved war and death and destruction. Hell most of our cities are so fucked its like americans are sad know one has deatroyed their own cities yet so they take it upon thwmselves to do it. Sick lot.
You are part of the problem, pal. So "Most Americans have been cheering on genocide for nearly twenty years now"? Really? How many Americans do you know? Zero? Most Americans have been appalled by their government since at least Reagan. Some watch MSM BS and believe it and therefore have no idea what is actually going on, but that is changing. Instead of making blanket generalizations about "Americans", vent your anger towards the assholes in DC, who are dictated to by greater assholes in London and Tel-Aviv.
All joking aside...that video is horrific....It is so sad that the cities are gone. Can you imagine losing everything to war? Having to just take what you can carry and run? I can't. When people lose everything to hurricanes or tornadoes, that is different. They chose to live there, and build in harms way.....you see the people cry and cry that they lost everything. I have not nearly the sympathy for them as I do these people in Syria. If you live in the middle of tornado alley in a trailer guess what will eventually happen? These people in Syria had no control or choice. Just venting some feelings.
Same as Tripoli, Baghdad, Beirut, etc. This is just ONE on countless countries raped, mauled and destroyed by NATO and co. And after that we get all upset by the rape game. Don't get me wrong I surely condem the latter to the utmost extent, but I also have no doubt that the former is a direct cause. Funny how things look when seen from a different perspective uh? And I'm not even from there! I can't imagine what I'd say & do if I were.
Amerika, fuck ya!
Yeah, see all the NATO soldiers in the film?
It's a stupid meme. These are Arabs killing Arabs, then Persians, then Kurds, then Alawhites, Sunni's, Shia, Turks, and on and on. You cannot get people in Western countries to do this. The basic material comes from themselves and their own culture.
You can argue whether or not Obama should have supported the Arab Spring and all the regime changes (I'd argue for not.) but this is what they do to each other. They will just trade dictators from now on.
It's not a NATO thing and that is one of the stupid, lazy, conspiracy-lemming statements.
Go fuck yourself, dumbass. Move to Syria and they will help you with that.
Did you see "NATO soldiers" when GLADIO was going on? Were they wearing their NATO uniforms then, lol?
So, you really think this is ME GLADIO? Mossad would be a bit better and more believable.
I say that this is their basic culture at work. When one dictator and his tribe (Assad-Alawite) fall, the others hope to step in and do basically the same thing.
Tripoli and Damascus were products of their culture you fucking idiot!! Damascus and Tripoli were cities of beautiful antiquity!! Their culture was such that they maintained themselves enough to at least not destroy their 3000 years old home!!!! Get that through your fucking head!!!
No city is truly ancient. The oldest cities in the world have at best a few old surviving structures and everything else is relatively recent.
Take Athens. An ancient city but built almost entirely in the 20th century, if you define Athens by its actual buildings. Just because the ruins are ancient does not mean a city is ancient, just the ruins are ancient.
Its all such a stupid orientalist meme. Jerusalem for instance is often touted as being over 3000 years old, but it was built in the 20th. Only the old walled city is old, but not older than 500 years, and a few structures within it are at most 1500 years old. You have to dig to find little bits of 3000 year old garbage, its quite dishonest to call the whole city ancient.
From your writing you are the idiot. Middle Eastern history was one of my subspecialties in college. I even studied Arabic and I have been there...dipshit. I have been to places you cannot find on a map, dipshit. You don't even know the cultures that were there...dipshit. Lots of cities which were far older are also gone...dipshit. Go find Carthage and see where it was...dipshit. Find Alexandria...dipshit. Wars always destroy cities...dipshit. Some rebuild over and over, like Berlin...dipshit.
Take your meds, open a book and look who was behind the guns who destroyed these places...dipshit.
I used to think Leftists, the beta types were truly the dumbest. Now, I am pretty sure it is the conspiracy types, left, right or in-between. It wouldn't be so bad if there are a smidgeon of rational debate to at least seaon the hyperbole.