City of Aleppo suffers as center of Syrian conflict
“Under attack. Nowhere to go, every minute feels like death. Pray for us. Goodbye.”
With one tweet, seven-year-old Syrian girl Bana Alabed exemplifies daily life in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city.
Aleppo has become a disaster area, caused by immense amounts of fighting that has taken place there. The New Yorker explains this fighting in an article titled “The Battle for Aleppo, Syria’s Stalingrad, Ends,” on Dec. 13 2016, where it is outlined that since 2012, the forces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad have fought against a group of rebels.
However, the government forces have now retaken almost all of the city that was formerly a rebel stronghold.
Aleppo has been hit extremely hard by this war, as airstrikes have reduced many buildings in the city to a pile of rubble. CNN reports, on Nov. 20, 2016, in an articled called “Syria activists: Airstrikes knock out hospitals in rebel-held Aleppo,” that in many cases, the indiscriminate bombing in Aleppo, done by Bashar Al-Assad and his Russian allies, directly harms civilians. The article also went on to point out that bombings have destroyed hospitals that civilians rely upon, sometimes for life saving emergency treatment.
Not only do civilians in Aleppo have reason to fear bombings, they also are threatened by government soldiers. In a Dec. 13, 2016 article by the BBC titled “Aleppo battle: UN says civilians shot on the spot,” government forces may kill civilians they come across. They cite a United Nations investigation that found that government forces have been killing people, as well as women in children, in their homes and on the street.
Moreover, the violence taking place in Aleppo is only one example of the widespread violence that plagues Syria. World Vision outlines on Dec. 22, 2016, that 4.8 million Syrians are refugees, forced to flee from the threat of violence.
The civil war struggle in Aleppo is an extremely delicate situation, and a disaster for human rights for those that live there.
