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.
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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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No more difficult than building a city where there wasnt one before, like Brasilia or Saint Petersburg. And truly it is only a matter of importing the steel and concrete. It can be super fast with external funding.
Everyone who thinks we need a revolution should understand that is where we go if someone starts shooting.
Sabotage. Kill profits, not people. It will avoid all that because sabotage is a variety of assymetric warfare and is much more effective than bullets. It is the ultimate coupling of concentrated force with maximum vulnerability : who better to break the machine than those of us who run it?
We will be able to target individual oligarchs and attack their investments, peel the system's support off one element at a time.
Pound pots and pans at 9PM when you are ready for things to go. Think about your part, which oligarch owns your company, what minor mistakes can cause max damage when combined with one you can help the ditsy blond in mail to make.
"The Office" episodes will be wonderful.
Fuck off. The state is far worse than any company (that doesn't collude with the state)... Who's holding the gun, the pigs or mcdonald's? Get real dude. The state is inherently coercive, businesses without the state only survive by providing things people will pay em for.
Start with the banks, and advertising agencies as neither produce anything of real value whilst seeking to control a population that they openly despise.
Use glue and small amounts of cement "creatively".
Operate your accounts to maximise their work whilst minimising the income they get.
IF you are fortunate enough to clear cheques though your bank, don't forget to add the odd staple.
Just do something small and get others to play too.
No wait......that's Detroit.
You're giving Detroit too much credit, it's not as clean as what's shown in the footage.
Next stop, Starnesville.
That's what a Democratic Freeocalypse looks like........
Their cities may be in ruin, but at least they can VOTE for their dictators this time! Truly progressive.
One of the places I would have loved to have visited and spent time in one of these years but how times change...
War crimes, brothers and sisters.
America in 10 years if we do not "Make America Great Again"!
Looks liberated to me! Golf clap Everyone!
Damn that is disturbing. I had to turn it off it reminded me of the beginning of the exorcist when they were on that archeological dig and uncovered the little statue of the Assyrian demon Pazuzu.
I hate that I am funding any of this, I feel like I am compacent in evil.
Americans are so proud. Idiots!
Watch the other video on the RT page, an interview with Col. Talal Silo of the FDS.
Looks clear to me that the opposition in Syria would have negotiated an end to the civil war with Assad by now but for ISIS, whose invasion has kept the fighting going. And ISIS wouldn't exist if Obama hadn't withdrawn from Iraq before the country was stable, leaving a power vacuum that ISIS neatly filled. And Obama wouldn't have had anyone to withdraw from Iraq if Bush II hadn't invaded the place to begin with.
Right Georgie-Porgie. The United States is attacked on 9-11 by Wahabbi Muslims from Saudi Arabia, so the numbskull invades Iraq. I'm glad to see that Trump gets it.
BTW, Silo speaks in favor of Russian airstrikes against ISIS but cautions them against hitting civilians.
today syria tommorow paris berlin london
Every country I see that is controlled by islam looses freedom, safety, and free will.
Systemic banning of collection of interest/general usurous monetary policy in Islamic banking?
Have those practices been in need of "liberation"?
Doesn't look like those democracy Christian bombs the USA and NATO dropped did too much good either.
Well acording to assclown Trump the problem is not enoungh bombs. "I would bomb the shit out of them" quote.
Hey dumb ass: Syria is not "controlled by Islam"
You dumb dick.
Ya'll bunch of pansy pessimists. This is great news. This is opportunity. Calling Halliburton. Calling Bechtel. Calling infrastructure funds! This is the rebuilding opportunity of a generation. Cement. OSB. Lumber. Steel. Power utility gear.
Those boys at GE must be creaming in their pants at this...
Did you notice how many dish antennae were still intact on the rooftops of all those destroyed bulidings?
Kind of like places I used to see in the hills of West Va. :)
And for what? WHAT?!?!?
For a little bit of money...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cOlwnJ24AE
All this plus all the unwanted refugee streaming in to countries all over the world because one man refuses to give up his power over the people.
Thats how fuckud up the world is.
Actually, the majority of the refugees are young men. THEY have refused to stay and fight for their country.
You mean Peace Prize, right?
I blame Jews for all this.
Yep..sure sounds like a jewish plot to me...what an idiot..
There's a 2% chance you're right.
There's also a 98% chance that the non-Jews did little or nothing to have prevented all this and caused a different outcome.
Stats, facts and cognitive dissonance are a bitch.
Still, amazing how isis seems to be "mowing the lawn"all around Israel...but not pointing to Israel's occupation of their sunni brothers for PR reasons, and how only a Jewish woman with deep ties to Israel was the only person who could find the isis videos, eh?
Would you say Jews {or more broadly, let's say 'Zionists'} only have a '2%' influence on us policy?
http://leaksource.info/2015/01/17/the-yinon-plan-greater-israel-syria-ir...
did they have no role in the Bolshevik revolution or getting the us into world war 1 and iraq either, because, gosh, it seems like they did, but that anyone not eager to have the discussion can make some quip about "blaming da joooos" and, poof- all that history gets memory-holed, just like the very Israel-centric reasons for US m.e. policy are perpetually just coincidentally what aipac and likud wants.
jmo.
Syria is being destroyed, as a state, largely, even mostly because that is what Israel and its global network of sayanim want.
Period.
But - you are right insofar as it is assinine to blame a fraction of a fraction of one ethnic or religious group given that most of the blood-letting is being done by "Christians" against Muslims... which... again... seems to benefit Muslims least of all...
Dark age is likely coming.
The videos are horrifying. I think if you boil the shit out of it....Syria simply don't have a strong just leader. If they had a good leader he would have united the people long ago and there wouldn't be a problem. The same with Iraq. Why hasn't Iraq got organized and back on track by now? Can anyone name a place on this planet these days where the wealthy and powerful haven't taken over and created a disaster for the majority of the people? I had a brother-in-law once upon a time that said when a person dies that everything should go into a property pool held by the government and be resold to the next individual. This would stop people like Warren Buffett and Hillary etc. from becoming too powerful. The House of Saud would be another example. Libya is another good example. there must be one hell of a power struggle going on there. The idea that the USA can send someone to mediate is self serving bullshit. I guess there is only one answer....war. I hope we all survive it.
Didn't look all that great before the war started. Lots of satellite dishes sitting nice and erect on top of those bombed out buildings. Guess the teevees and computers survived it all.
So sad.
Our Tax dollars, Euro's, Looney's at work creating another soon to be exceptional democracy.
The real question is how many of the people that lived there and belonged to ISIS are now living in Europe
If this was done to my home, i'd be a little"extreme"too.
The amazing thing is that all the people that had lived there have walked all the way to Europe... With ever step they remember how much they hate Europe and the USA for blowing up their houses...
They hate any thinking human being because they choose not to think for themselves. I have very little sympathy for people who chose to be thugs.
Read about Political Islam. Mohammed hijacked key points in Judaism and Christianity and twisted it into a power structure religion.
Read the Pentateuch... Judaism was already a power structure religion. In fact it is about power and materialism more than any other "religion" on earth, at least going by the naked text.
Have you ever sat and read it?
dupe
dupe
If only these pictures could be Washington D.C. during a SOTU address with everybody in the U.S. Federal government in the "worst of those pictures" of Damascus?...
Great News!...
Russia can make Washington D.C. look a whole lot worse in less than "20 minutes" if it has to!!!
This is exactly how the Imperialism of Capital is employed by agents of The Great Red Dragon: First they finance the contruction. When profitability starts to taper off, they begin to sell that area short, while ramping up destructive forces. Then the area is destroyed. All who couldn't pay lost their titles. Rinse and repeat. Few know who their REAL enemy is. The REAL enemy pays to be represented, so their hands are never found dirty. But their goal is "to own the earth in fee-simple."
May the neo-con zionist pieces of shit & their wretched sacred homeland die a slow and painful death!
Hey guy...I think it is mostly arab guys killing arab guys...
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