Bearing witness: I present to you Aleppo, a city that predates written history, the second oldest inhabited city in the world, as it was and as it has become after the deadly shadow of destruction and annihilation fell upon her: Part one

I am reposing my article on the destruction of Aleppo in support of the campaign

https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/savealeppo

alisariram

I have been delaying writing about Aleppo because it means pain revisited, agony relived and scenes of devastation and human loss reenacted.  Something about Aleppo stops my heart when I go through the images of annihilation that depict the gradual death of a great city.  I do not know exactly how many people died in Aleppo and how many fled with bare nothing to start lives of wandering and displacement. To tell you the truth, I am afraid to know.  Too much reality destroys the mind. I do not have that kind of spiritual strength, the strength that can bear witness to the death, the fall from living, the waning, call it whatever you want to call it, of a great immortal city for there has always been an Aleppo starting from the 6th millennium BC to the present day.

I am pulled in several directions :part of me wants to write a personal invocation, an elegy for a  dying city and…

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