Talk:Aleppo

Tangential

 * Assad's bombs gave life to IS in Syria. People have been radicalised and ultimately, view IS as a protector of Sunnis. Assad's air strikes on cities, like Aleppo, or the targeted infrastructure attacks, were fatal. His assaults killed seven times more civilians than IS has.
 * Kristin Helberg, 28 December 2015 en.qantara.de


 * Allow me to break down the facts of hunger as they stand right now. 811 million people are chronically hungry. 283 million are in hunger crises — they are marching toward starvation. And within that, 45 million in 43 countries across the globe are in hunger emergencies — in other words, famine is knocking on their door. Places like Afghanistan. Madagascar. Myanmar. Guatemala. Ethiopia. Sudan. South Sudan. Mozambique. Niger. Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Haiti and on and on and on. The world has often experienced famine. But when has it ever been so widespread, in so many places, at the same time? Why? Three reasons. First, man-made conflict. Dozens of civil wars and regional conflicts are raging, and hunger has been weaponized to achieve military and political objectives. Second, climate shocks /climate change. Floods, droughts, locusts and rapidly changing weather patterns have created severe crop failures around the world. Third, COVID-19. The viral pandemic has created a secondary hunger pandemic, which is far worse than the first. Shutdowns destroyed livelihoods. Shutdowns stopped the movement of food. Shutdowns inflated prices. The net result is the poor of the world are priced out of survival. The ripple effect of COVID has been devastating on the global economy. During the pandemic, $3.7 trillion in incomes — mostly among the poor — have been wiped out, while food prices are spiking. The cost of shipping food, for example, has increased 3 – 400%. But in places of conflict and low-income countries, it is even worse. For example, in Aleppo, Syria — a war zone, where I just returned from — food is now seven times more expensive than it was 2 years ago. The combined effect of these three — conflict, climate and COVID — has created an unprecedented perfect storm.
 * David Beasley, Nobel Peace Prize lecture of World Food Programme, 10 December 2021


 * But how did variolation emerge in the Ottoman Empire? It turns out that at the time of Lady Montagu’s letter to her friend, variolation, or rather inoculation, was practised in a number of different places around the world. In 1714, Dr Emmanuel Timmonius, resident in Constantinople, had described the procedure of inoculation in a letter that was eventually published by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London). He claimed that “the Circassians, Georgians, and other Asiatics” had introduced this practice “among the Turks and others at Constantinople”. His letter triggered a reply from Cotton Maher, a minister in Boston, USA, who reported that his servant Onesimus had undergone the procedure as a child in what is now southern Liberia, Africa. Moreover, two Welsh doctors, Perrot Williams and Richard Wright, reported that inoculation was well known in Wales and had been practised there since at least 1600.  Patrick Russell, an English doctor living in Aleppo (then part of the Ottoman Empire), described his investigations into the origins of inoculation in a letter written in 1786. He had sought the help of historians and doctors, who agreed that the practice was very old but was completely missing from written records. Nevertheless, it appears that at the time, inoculation was practised independently in several parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. The use of the needle (and often pinpricks in a circular pattern) was a common feature, but some places had other techniques: for example, in Scotland, smallpox-contaminated wool (a ‘pocky thread’) was wrapped around a child’s wrist, and in other places, smallpox scabs were placed into the hand of a child in order to confer protection. Despite the different techniques used, the procedure was referred to by the same name — ‘buying the pocks’ — which implies that inoculation may have had a single origin.
 * Alexandra Flemming, “The origins of vaccination”, Nature, (28 Sept, 2020)


 * Assad as President has actively tried to kill his own people. He has bombed them with barrel bombs in a most terrible way.  He has brought untold suffering over his people -- if you look at Aleppo and other places.  When you talk to the many Syrian refugees who have fled here to Germany, they will be able to tell you their own personal story, and the majority of them -- the great majority of them -- fled from Assad, and most of them not even fled the IS.  So I don’t see him as an ally.
 * Angela Merkel, Remarks by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel of Germany in a Joint Press Conference (November 17, 2016)


 * When I returned to Aleppo in September 1915 … a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation. . . . In dilapidated caravansaries (in Aleppo) I found quantities of dead (many corpses being half-decomposed) and others, still living among them, who were soon to breathe their last. . . . masses of half-starved people, the survivors of so-called 'deportation convoys.' I was told, to cover the extermination of the Armenian nation with a political cloak, military reasons were being put forward... After I had informed myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to exterminate the whole nation. What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last scene in the great tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama that was being played out simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them. The Consuls are of opinion that, so far, probably about one million Armenians have perished in the massacres of the last few months. Of this number, one must reckon that at least half are women and children who have either been murdered or have succumbed to starvation. The Arabs of the village declared that they had killed these Armenians by the Government's orders. A newspaper reporter was told by one of these gentlemen "Certainly we are now punishing many innocent people as well. But we have to guard ourselves even against those who may one day become guilty." On such grounds Turkish statesmen justify the wholesale slaughter of defenceless women and children. A German Catholic ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha declared, in the presence of Monsignore Dolci, the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he would not rest so long as a single Armenian remained alive. The object of the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation.
 * Dr. Martin Niepage, in The Horrors of Aleppo; Engl. Trans. Doran Co., appeared in the New York Times publication Current History Vol. 5 Nov. 1916 pp 335-37. Dr Niepage was a German Schoolteacher in Aleppo who directly witnessed and wrote about the horrors of the Armenian Genocide.


 * The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.... As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.... From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked."
 * John Pilger, Inside the Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton & Trump, Information Clearing House, October 28, 2016


 * The US now has training camps featuring imitation “Arab” urban districts, and has picked up the Israeli practice of entering a dense neighbourhood not via the street, but by crossing through homes – a parallel pathway to the street, running from one interior room to another by carving holes in contiguous walls, and dealing with the inhabitants as they come across them. They have learned, above all, that the city itself has become an obstacle. And while it is true that they can simply bomb a city to pieces – as we’ve seen with the bombing of Aleppo and other cities by Syria’s government and its allies – we have not recently seen the total destruction of the Hiroshima nuclear attack or the fire-bombing of Dresden.
 * Saskia Sassen, “Welcome to a new kind of war: the rise of endless urban conflict”, The Guardian, (30 Jan 2018), last modified on (11 May 2018).