(C) Common Dreams
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What the ruins of Kobane tell us about the destruction of Syria [1]
['Story By', 'Photos By']
Date: 2015-11-13
Four months of fighting between Kurdish forces — backed by U.S. air power — and the Islamic State has left much of the town of Kobane in rubble. At least 3,247 structures were damaged.
On Sept. 2, Rayhan, Ghaleb and Alan all drowned when their flimsy dinghy filled with water and sank off the Turkish resort town of Bodrum, along with two Iraqi children.
Kurdi refused to discuss details of the incident. But he said he felt he had no other choice than to try to start a new life — his wages were too low for the family to live in Istanbul and when they returned to Kobane after the fighting ended, they found their home gone.
“We had nothing to stay for,” said Kurdi, who is now living in Iraqi Kurdistan and was speaking during a brief visit to his family. “Every house here is damaged. In every house there is the smell of war. People are only living here because they don’t have any choice and because they suffered too much as refugees.”
[For desperate refugees, ‘the smuggler’s room is over there’]
Kobane offers just a glimpse of the wider devastation being inflicted around Syria. The war here was brief by comparison to some of the battles still raging elsewhere, but it was fierce. The Islamic State attacked in September last year, surged into the town, then by January had been driven out by local Kurdish forces aided by U.S. strikes.
The victory has repeatedly been held out by President Obama and other U.S. officials as one of the greatest triumphs of the war so far, a David and Goliath encounter in which outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish fighters held at bay then eventually defeated wave after wave of militant invaders.
But in those four short months, much of the town was reduced to rubble. Barely a street or a building was untouched. Whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, their streets a ghostly echo of the life they once contained.
And Kobane is by no means the worst afflicted of the communities ravaged by war, many of which have been fought over continuously for the past four years. In the northern metropolis of Aleppo, one of Syria’s major cities, more than 14,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, mostly in airstrikes conducted by the Syrian government, according to satellite imagery studied by the United Nations.
That includes only the damage visible from the sky — other buildings are likely to have been wrecked by the mortar and artillery fired on a daily basis across the front lines, said Lars Bromley, who analyzes the satellite imagery for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
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[1] Url:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/11/13/kobane/
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