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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Damascus looks even worse than Detroit. But Detroit is becoming more muslem.
I live in Detroit, and Damascus looks worse ... anyway they aren't using mortars here anymore ...
This is the destruction caused by our US State Department and its manaical heads, including the peace prize winner Obama. I haven't felt so helpless to do anything in my 81 years of life. Assad is disliked? Let's destroy his country to put one of our puppets in charge. Have we lost all sense of decency?
Yes.
HOW do we stop it? How?
I told you this maybe a month ago. I did the chart of Syria and I said it is going to die given the placements of the nation of Syria and the Uranus Pluto square locked on. It's over for Syria.
But nobody listened to me, it is the Casandra experience I have this life.
I would have listened but you dont care about me anymore.
But they still couldn't find the oil tanker trucks....
On another note, we are not complicit by paying for this we are actually accomplices. We are accomplices when we fund it through our taxes because we are afraid if we don't pay we will go to jail or lose everything. I look at small time tax evaders differently now. They have acheived complicit.
The repubs. agreed tonite that America should lead a Sunni invasion of Syria with 20,000 US troops. And why ? Because SAUDI ARABIA DEMANDS IT". And the end goal?? "TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY TO SYRIA" (and Assad gasses his own people) Not joking here. (the debate)
Sweet Jesus ... imbeciles ... All of them agreed to that?
<-- Satan America, may you be paid in the same manner (period)
all due to CabalA$$LickerLiarAddictObamma ,
Abomination that causes desolation
As the Deal to maintain the $US. Petro-Dollar falters due to the House of Saud being beaten both in Control of what OPEC stood for and in it's Finances........
Iraq, Libia and Syria have been Flattened, all set up for American Contractors to go in and make bids on New Infrastucture Projects. Think ....like..........Oil for Security......
We manage the Books.......
Trump, Clinton, Lawrence Krauss, Jeffrey Epstein and Copernicus in 2016
If someone started a joke with the line “Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein and Nicolaus Copernicus walk into a bar…”, most people would raise an eyebrow. What the heck ties this cast of charactrers together?
#Copernicusgate
"“The civil war has been going on four years. "
No, there was a small protest by Syrians, some of whome were Islamist, and some of whom used weapons and violence immediately. Within a few months it had transferred into an invasion by mostly foreign al qaeda terrorists, later joined by terror proxies and mercs sent in by the us, saudis, turks, and others.
To describe Syria as in a "civil war" is not just inaccurate, it is fundamentally incorrect.
That's a helluva load of ordnance been expended there.
Who paid for all that?
Everyone with a W-2
Truth.
It's why EVERYONE should seek 1099 compensation.
Israel is absolutely the cause of this. Israel has an evil, two-stage game, to first eviscerate Iran and the secular Arab states, then use the lack of form to expand its borders to include several million more Arab non-citizens. The media will still refer to Israel as a "democracy," of course. Israel and Saudi Arabia banded together after 9-11, realizing the Jewish influence in government, the media and academia, and the vile tribal allegiance most Jews have to Israeli imperialism, gave them strength amid chaos. The Saudis are absolute evil. They have no integrity in their beliefs- Bin Laden was right about them. The Saudi royal family are to a man depraved cocaine-addicted homosexuals who yet butcher their own people for even the most minor of infractions. And the tragedy is compounded because it is Iran which is the Arab state furthest along the road to a proper civilization. Iran has a real Parliament and rights for women and Jews. Saudi will never have any of this, of course. The Israeli calculus led directly to the formation of ISIS. And make no mistake about it: Hillary Clinton will double down on all of this. John Kerry and years before James Baker were the only two people in our government who tried to adjust any of this.
you are not wrong, and refer to a line of plans going back decades. Oded Yinon > A Clean Break > Rebuilding America's Defenses > The Redirection/Which Path to Persia.
9/11 is the key. Expect increasingly wild efforts to rewrite history and to blame Saudi Arabia, but not elements of the US and Israeli governments, for that horrific event. We've already seen the efforts to Orwellize just who was caught celebrating 9/11.
Good luck finding an Iranian who would take you seriously after calling Iran an Arab state
Make way for the Flintstones.
A city is made of bricks, steel and cement; the Syrian human spirit is obviously made of stronger stuff. The USSA has destroyed one nation after another in a century of genocide and terror. Now the human spirit has ceased to exist inside a nation seething with corruption and decadence where its own people are more despised by the Anglozionazi Empire of Carnage than its century of colonial victms. KARMA is finally coming to Merca and when this sewer implodes it will make all our bouts of genocide for the judaics look like "the good old days."
I bet the ragheads don't pray in those streets .... the streets of New York are much safer .... LOL ?
That's how democracy looks like.
"We flatten civilization .... while you wait !" .... Muslim Brothers Demolitions
I hope the cities of the Evil Empire who is responsible for this will look like Damask one day. Not from someone's invasion but from the local civil war...
Damascus is the largest of the ancient cities in the world which claims to be the oldest inhabited city. Despite its size and longevity, Isaiah 17 predicted it will be destroyed and become ruins.
We are living in the last of the last days. Prophecy is being fulfilled right before our eyes. Christ tarries only to be sure that every man who can be save is saved.
The US is the Babylon described in Revelation. Your gold and your weapons will not save you when Babylon is destroyed. Salvation is through Christ and Christ alone.
Religion always has and always will be the prime destroyer of spirituality. Save your silly Christ, Allah, Buddha myths and all the other tales of misery and blood for the deranged.
Onward to the collapse, if that's what it takes to rid us of the evil festering all around the planet.
We fucked this place up good, No food, no shelter, no water. Can we go to the US and continue this?
playing out world wide in city near you soon enough
They must have found oil under Damascus. What is the point of taking the territory if there is nothing and no one there?
Israhell needs to be hit with at least $100 trillion in reparations for the impact their greater israel f'ing fantasy has had on the middle east and the wider world in general. Hit em where it hurts, their precious moolah.
Demand at least 1000 trillion and we will all be 10 times richer!
Congratulations warmongers of the world. Mission accomplished (almost)!
As a teenager I spent about a month in Damascus (1975). It was a beautiful place back then.
To look at what it has become, at the hands of people who have never been there or have never known a single Syrian, is very sad.
But, but, but...Vladdy Putin was going to save the country!!!!
But, but, but...Vladdy Putin was going to save the country!!!!
AND not one single Syrian refugee in Russia.
Europe -- do NOT forget that!
this sub-human scum destroyed all their country and now they want to live europe ?
the hell they will !
they are all the same, there are no goods or bads... only GENES
Coming shortly to (you name!) western cities! thanks to Obama,Cameron, Merkel.
Damn. I thought that was parts of Russia.
BTW. Interesting that father of RT wound up dead in Wash DC hotel. Apparently Putins cronies are looking for a way out and they got him before FBI could protect him. Anyhow, Putins finished. His biggest supporters are bailing and that means he's done. We all knew it would happen sooner or later -- and the time is now.
---
Russian Millionaire & Founder Of RT Discovered Dead In Washington DC Hotel Room
NOVEMBER 7, 2015
It was reported late on Friday that Mikhail Lesin, the former head of media affairs for the Russian government, and the founder of Russia Today (RT), was found dead in the hotel room that he was staying at in Washington DC.
Mikhail Lesin, who was Putin's press secretary during his first stint as president and founded state television network Russia Today, died aged 57.