Aleppo Part iii: The City of Aleppo

Once considered the crown jewel of Syria, Aleppo has been the hardest hit and suffered the heaviest violence over the last five years. For a war that started in July of 2012, and cost the country more than 300,000 lives, it’s an all too constant reminder that the city has become a battleground for the Western section controlled by the Syrian Army and Eastern section patrolled by the Jihadi terrorists.

• Syria’s largest city, and the third largest in the region behind Constantinople and Cairo
• Located at the Northeastern tip of Syria
• First settled in 5000 BC
• Consistently inhabited since 4000 BC due to it’s proximity between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq
• First city council established in 1868
• Population of about 2.3 million, roughly the same size as Toronto, Ontario
• UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986, Aleppo citadel (seen in the photo above), was built over three centuries from the 10th century and damaged in July 2015 by heavy air raid blasts

ALEPPO PART II: PROPAGANDA

Since 2012, it has proven to be too dangerous for Western journalists or foreign correspondents to report directly from Syria. Most now file their reports from nearly 300 km away, in Beirut, Lebanon. Or roughly the distance from Ottawa, Ontario to Drummondville, Quebec. How could we possibly expect accurate news given such a distance?

In their place, through either self interest or naivety, “local activists” unable to escape jihadi control have taken over. These sources operate under the complete control of al-Qaeda sponsored news groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

Below is a list of some of the most questionable propaganda tools:
• Omran Daqneesh, the Aleppo boy
– if his injuries were so bad that he required an ambulance, why were media allowed to take photos of him before he received treatment?
– his image has resurfaced in numerous other photos/videos in several different situations, including in one where he’s about to become beheaded
– from most reports, it appears to be Trauma makeup
• White Helmet staged mannequin challenge rescue videos
– illustrates how easily it would be to stage other rescues
• Seven year old Syrian girl, Bana Alabed who has a verified twitter account
– in an area as badly hit as Eastern Aleppo, how was she able to maintain a twitter account, when many of the city’s remaining residents are without power?
– why would a mother (who is apparently helping her run this account) choose to remain in Aleppo where food and water is scarce?
– how did she become verified on twitter so quickly?
– why is her mother dressed as a jihadist fighter in some of the photos on her original twitter account?
– why was her account registered in the UK?

Part 3 will feature a profile on the city of Aleppo for late Wednesday night.

Aleppo Part I: The White Helmets

I’ve put together this 3 part fact sheet on various topics related to the city of Aleppo. It is the worst hit and largest city in Syria, and according to Wikipedia is the site of “major military confrontation between the Syrian opposition (including Free Syrian Army, and Sunni fighters, including Levant Front) in partial cooperation with the Army of Conquest, which includes within it Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly al-Qaida‘s Syrian branch,^[88] against the Syrian Armed Forces of the Syrian Government, supported by Hezbollah and Shiite militias and Russia,^[65][89] and against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.”

Part 1 will focus on the White Helmets, as they’re known within the media, or the Syrian Civil Defence, their official title.

• Founded in 2013 (by a British ex-military officer, James Le Mesurier, more than one year after the ongoing Battle of Aleppo began in 2012)
• In Eastern Aleppo and Idlib (a city South of Aleppo), the hardest hit areas, their presence is minimal
• Major funding is being provided by USAID, to the tune of more than $23 million
• Total funding since 2012 is estimated at $100 million by the US/UK and other influential countries
• As of 5 days ago, 95% of the area has been liberated by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA)
• They purport to be neutral, yet some carry guns and reports have stated that some are posing for photos standing over dead Syrian soldier’s bodies
• Their videos contain children identified in multiple video sources used primarily as propaganda

Monday will feature Part 2: Propaganda

That whole Trump is like Hitler meme

This mornings article is in reference to this tweet: https://twitter.com/BrandMooreArt/status/780391058358280193 and also this one as well: https://twitter.com/mattgood/status/780412920689754112

I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Far more than I ever did on Facebook. And since joining in 2011, it’s been my go to for political news and updates from around the world. A veritable feed of any type of information I’m looking for from who won the Tigers game last night (12-0 Tigs over the Cleveland Indians), to Theo Walcott’s passing percentage v Chelsea (77%), to the amount of unarmed civilians Obama has droned since taking office (at least 314 since 2009).

But where there’s a wealth indisputable knowledge, there’s also conjecture and lunacy. There’s tightrope walking that fine line of Political Correctness that still allows hundreds of thousands of us a soapbox of our very own. And magazines like Medium to make sweeping statements that wind around and never really go anywhere.

As of this morning, I follow 604 different Twitter accounts. Most of them news conglomerates, politicians and a wide variety of graphic designers, whose posts help inspire me and see the design world from a different perspective. On Monday morning, a pair of tweets appeared in my timeline.

Firstly, this one:

It certainly caught my attention.

Hitler was a lot of things to a myriad of people. But no one can argue that with the help of German clothing designer Hugo Boss, he had an immense sense of style. The Feldgrau and Luftwaffe fashion is still part of every day wear over 80 years after. He also had some incredibly lofty ideas that made Germany a super power and a country feared by every neighbour within a one hundred mile radius of Berlin. The article, sadly, does nothing to prove it’s point for or against.

The second tweet, was by Canadian rock musician Matthew Good, someone I’ve known for well over 20 years, and whose politics have always been concise and well thought out yet, filled to the brim with a foreboding tinge that let’s you know exactly who he’s backing. Put mildly, he’s very Liberal.

I probably should’ve been more eloquent. I certainly could’ve been less biased as well. But what developed was an exchange over direct message that would compare former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to a war mongering sociopath, while mostly overlooking the atrocities carried out by this regime. My point was, that if you kill one person, or you kill over 300, you’re still a criminal. And since Trump, to the best of my knowledge has done neither, that sets him apart.

Trump is different. He’s not a politician. He’s not beholden to anyone. I’m not an American, so it’s irrelevant really, but given the opportunity I’d throw my vote away on Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, despite the fact that msm berated him for not knowing what Aleppo is.

That said, I can fully understand why someone would vote for Trump instead of a lying, conniving criminal like Hillary, who would likely sell out her own family and backstab her former cohorts at the State to have another chance of climbing those White House steps. She lied to congress, she covered up the planned kidnapping and eventual killing of an Ambassador, while her and Obama blamed it on a laughable propaganda film denouncing Mohammed.

Hitler had some truly terrible ideas when it came to ethnic cleansing, eugenics and racial purity. None of which I see in Trump. Frankly, Hillary’s win at all costs mentality is far more in line with the Third Reich, in my honest opinion.