{"id":4537,"date":"2016-04-07T11:20:47","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T17:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=4537"},"modified":"2016-04-07T11:20:47","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T17:20:47","slug":"inside-war-ravaged-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/inside-war-ravaged-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside War Ravaged Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Andrew Katz
\nApril 7, 2016<\/h5>\n

Italian photographer Lorenzo Meloni documented the wrath of war in Homs, Aleppo and Palmyra<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The killing fields in Syria spread quickly. Blood has spilled from streets to neighborhoods, urban centers out to the countryside, and eventually to ancient ruins. No corner of the country has been spared. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have fled internally, crossed into neighboring countries or Europe, exacerbating a global refugee crisis. A cease-fire between the government and opposition factions hangs in the balance six months after Russia officially entered this intractable fray to support President Bashar Assad.<\/p>\n

Magnum photographer Lorenzo Meloni, who for years has documented the grind of war and its toll on civilians, fighters and their surroundings, recently returned from a weeklong trip inside Syria. Based in Paris but often in Beirut, he obtained a visa and, after arriving to Damascus on March 26, soon ventured out to three major cities \u2014 Aleppo, Homs and Palmyra.<\/p>\n

In Aleppo, he observed the mourning of a government soldier who died fighting ISIS, and photographed internally displaced men, women and children living in a former university building that was converted into a refugee center by a Syrian aid group. He stood in the city\u2019s famous souk, one of six UNESCO World Heritage Sites around Syria that have all been damaged\u2014not solely by jihadists. In one surreal scene, he watched the protestant vicar\u2019s wife use a selfie stick to take photos of the congregation gathered outside the new church as part of the Easter celebrations.<\/p>\n

The city has two sides: the sections that have retained an essence of normalcy\u2014\u201cit still feels like you\u2019re in a warzone, but a different kind,\u201d Meloni says\u2014and their counterparts, the war-torn areas have been so bombed and shelled that the mind struggles to understand how it can be rebuilt. In this two-faced city, Meloni says, \u201cmost people have lost at least one relative in this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Homs, Meloni saw streets and districts that had been bombed-out, like in the Bab Amr district, where the February 2012 shelling of a makeshift media center in an opposition-held area killed journalist Marie Colvin, an American working with London\u2019s Sunday Times<\/em>, and French photographerRem\u00ed Ochlik<\/a>. Some families displaced by the war had taken refuge in the shell of a school, or returned to their own half-collapsed homes. Flowers had been painted on the shell-ridden exterior of one building.<\/p>\n

During this trip Meloni received permission from the Syrian government to enter Palmyra, the city in central Syria that has recently been recaptured from ISIS after 10 months. Palmyra\u2019s ancient ruins are among the world\u2019s most coveted cultural sites. Meloni and a handful of journalists got there early in the morning and left in the evening, spending the day shadowing government forces and seeing what remained of the ancient site.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe arrived at a very important moment,\u201d he says. \u201cThe first thing that the commander wanted to get across was the importance of commemorating the fighters who died there.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the hilltop citadel, Meloni observed smoke rise from the modern city where, he was told, bomb disposal teams were detonating booby traps and mines\u2014ISIS parting gifts. He photographed Syrian soldiers at the amphitheater where ISIS militants conducted executions, and watched them traipse around the new ruins of the ancient ruins. \u201cBefore being there, I was really afraid that everything was destroyed,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter we arrived, I saw that many of the [structures] had survived.\u201d Among the losses was the Temple of Bel, reduced to a sole portico above a bed of rubble.<\/p>\n

SEE THE PALMYRA WE CAN NEVER GET BACK:<\/p>\n

\"syria3<\/a>
The Tetrapylon, Palmyra. The structure was originally built in pink granite, but only one of its sixteen pillars is still of that material; much of the tetrapylon has been reconstructed. This imposing structure served as a sort of traffic roundabout, a function in which it is still useful, as the photograph indicates. 2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He found statues that had been defaced and ancient columns which, despite weathering empires, had been felled. He stood near the fountain where ISIS showed off the decapitated body of Palmyra\u2019s octogenarian antiquities scholar and top local preservationist.<\/p>\n

Teju Cole, the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, put it best<\/a> in a column last October. He wrote that a temple, \u201cas a record of both human skill and emotion, is already a site of memory; when its only remaining trace is a photograph, that photograph becomes a memorial to a memory.\u201d It is that photograph, he continues, that is \u201cshadowed by its vanished ancestor.\u201d<\/p>\n

This notion is not limited to ruins of ancient times. It can be applied to the living and the dead, and the numbing destruction in parts of Aleppo and Homs that Meloni shows us in his pictures\u2014in this evidence.<\/p>\n

You can read the original article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Andrew Katz April 7, 2016 Italian photographer Lorenzo Meloni documented the wrath of war in Homs, Aleppo and Palmyra The killing fields in Syria spread quickly. Blood has spilled from streets to neighborhoods, urban centers out to the countryside, and eventually to ancient ruins. No corner of the country has been spared. Hundreds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4537"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4542,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4537\/revisions\/4542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}