This article gives a good overview of the situation..
An Ever-Bleaker Syria, From All Vantage Points
By BEN HUBBARDMARCH 14, 2015
Photo
Destroyed buildings in Homs. About half of Syria’s prewar population has fled, the United Nations says, and nearly four million people are refugees abroad. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Government helicopters rained barrel bombs on villages across Syria last week, killing civilians and demolishing homes. Hundreds of combatants died in battles that failed to move the front lines. And activists spread videos of hungry, war-weary Syrians through social media.
“We can’t move. We can’t walk,” a languid old man says in one videoshot near the capital, Damascus. “This situation won’t work.”
But one of the starkest indications of what four years of conflict have done to Syria came from space, withnew satellite images showing that mass destruction and displacement have extinguished more than four-fifths of the country’s lights, according to an analysis by Xi Li of Wuhan University in China and the University of Maryland at College Park.
The Syria conflict began four years ago this week with protests calling for political reforms inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East.
Continue reading at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/an-ever-bleaker-syria-from-all-vantage-points.html?&_r=0
An Ever-Bleaker Syria, From All Vantage Points
By BEN HUBBARDMARCH 14, 2015
Photo
Destroyed buildings in Homs. About half of Syria’s prewar population has fled, the United Nations says, and nearly four million people are refugees abroad. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Government helicopters rained barrel bombs on villages across Syria last week, killing civilians and demolishing homes. Hundreds of combatants died in battles that failed to move the front lines. And activists spread videos of hungry, war-weary Syrians through social media.
“We can’t move. We can’t walk,” a languid old man says in one videoshot near the capital, Damascus. “This situation won’t work.”
But one of the starkest indications of what four years of conflict have done to Syria came from space, withnew satellite images showing that mass destruction and displacement have extinguished more than four-fifths of the country’s lights, according to an analysis by Xi Li of Wuhan University in China and the University of Maryland at College Park.
The Syria conflict began four years ago this week with protests calling for political reforms inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East.
Continue reading at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/an-ever-bleaker-syria-from-all-vantage-points.html?&_r=0
