SYRIA'S MISSING CITY: HOW THE CONFLICT IS FOUGHT

By now, the world has become fully aware of the fact that the battle waged against the population in Syria is one of the worst ever documented.

People are being murdered and kidnapped, entire families killed.  Children are used as pawns, women as example.

But it seems that not only people are missing.  Now an entire village has disappeared into the rubble of a once populous town.

Pictures of bombed and bullet riddled buildings have been trickling out of Syria for a while, but the scale of the devastation is so vast that it defies imagination.  

A town of 100,000 near Aleppo is now no more.  It has been erased, gone, leveled.  Its ruins are no more than debris. There is not even a hint of what the town once was.  Rebels and opposition fighters are now the only occupants, using the ruins as a place to hide.  

But where has the population gone? 

At first the town saw its numbers increase, as people fleeing the worst of the fighting moved in.  Almost 70,000 of them.  But then the worst of the fighting reached even this town.  As the rebels moved in for position, the Syrian army followed with a barrage of bombing and shooting. And even if a few people still cling to what's left of the town, the shelling continues unabated.  

Now the only people even daring to roam or venture the boulder filled streets are foreign fighters from Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.  

But what is truly reason for concern in this area, is that a large chemical weapon stockpile is stored nearby, although there is no way of knowing for certain if the depot is indeed in the area.  And the rebels are closing in on it.  This is a problem that keeps a lot of government heads up at night.  What will become of the cache if the rebels get their hands on it?  What will happen if the army blows it up to prevent it from falling into their hands? 

Any of this scenarios is chilling.

Civilians are becoming resigned to the fact that no one from outside will be able to stop Bashar Al Assad. They are resigned to a fate that seems bleaker every day.  And what could be worse, a civil war that was begun with the intent of achieving democracy and end tyranny could wind up seeing Syria become an easy pawn for radical Islamists, who so far have been the only thing standing between Assad's army and them.

Source: BBC 3.11.13