Tag Archives: War

U.S.-backed Syria militias say Tabqa, dam captured from Islamic State

FILE PHOTO: A view shows Tabqa City as seen from the northern part of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River, Syria March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Rodi Said/File Photo

By Ellen Francis

BEIRUT (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Syrian militias said they fully seized the town of Tabqa and Syria’s largest dam from Islamic State on Wednesday, a major objective as they prepare to launch an assault on Raqqa, the jihadists’ biggest urban stronghold.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, have been battling the militant group for weeks in Tabqa, some 40 km (25 miles) west of Raqqa, along the Euphrates River.

With air strikes and special forces from the U.S.-led coalition, the SDF are advancing on Raqqa to ultimately take the city, which is also the Islamic State’s base of operations in Syria.

They captured Tabqa “thanks to the sacrifices of the SDF’s heroes and with the full, unlimited support of the U.S.-led international coalition”, said SDF spokesman Talal Silo.

Nasser Haj Mansour, an adviser to the SDF, said the town and the adjacent Tabqa dam were now “completely liberated” after the SDF drove all Islamic State militants out.

Brett McGurk, the U.S.’ special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter Islamic State, confirmed on Twitter that Tabqa had been retaken.

“Confirmed: #ISIS defeated in #Tabqa Dam and Tabqa City, now in hands of Syrian Democratic Forces, led by its Syrian Arab Coalition. #SDF”, McGurk tweeted.

The Raqqa campaign appeared to have stalled around Tabqa, where the SDF made only slow progress after besieging the city. They pushed into Tabqa nearly two weeks ago, capturing most of its districts and encircling Islamic State at the dam.

The battle for Tabqa began after U.S. forces helped SDF fighters conduct an airborne landing on the southern bank of the Euphrates in late March, allowing them to gain control of an important nearby airbase.

Despite fierce objections from NATO ally Turkey, the United States this week approved supplying arms to the powerful Kurdish YPG militia, a key component of the SDF and their campaign.

Ankara strongly opposes U.S. support of the YPG, viewing it as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency within Turkey.

But the YPG has emerged as a valuable partner for the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria. Washington maintains arming the Syrian Kurdish forces is necessary to capture Raqqa, which Islamic State has also used a hub for planning attacks abroad.

Raqqa now lies in an Islamic State enclave on the northern bank of the Euphrates, after the SDF has closed in on the city from the north, east and west in recent months.

Islamic State’s only means of crossing to its main territory south of the river is by boat after air strikes knocked the area’s bridges out of service.

The jihadist group still controls swathes of Syria’s vast eastern deserts and most of Deir al-Zor province near the border with Iraq, but it has lost tracts of its territory over the past year.

(Reporting by Ellen Francis, additional reporting by Idrees Ali; editing by Robin Pomeroy, Alison Williams and G Crosse)

U.N. has ‘a million questions’ on Syria after Astana deal

United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura attends a news conference at the European headquarters of the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland May 11 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations still has a million questions about a Syria deal struck last week by Russia, Turkey and Iran, with aid convoys almost totally stalled despite a reported reduction in the fighting, a U.N. aid official said on Thursday.

“Russia and Turkey and Iran explained to us today and yesterday … that they will work very openly, proactively, with United Nations and humanitarian partners to implement this agreement,” U.N. Syria humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland told reporters.

“We do have a million questions and concerns but I think we don’t have the luxury that some have, of this distant cynicism, and saying it will fail. We need this to succeed.”

The three-country deal on de-escalation zones was signed last week in the Kazakh capital Astana, with a goal of resolving operational issues, such as how to police the zones, within two weeks and of mapping them out by June 4.

U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said he was convening what he called “rather business-like, rather short” peace talks in Geneva from May 16-19 to take advantage of the momentum. The political weight of the signatories and the staggered timing of the deal gave it a strong chance of working.

The alternative would be “another 10 Aleppos”, he said, referring to Syria’s second city which fell to forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in December after years of fighting.

A key aspect of the Astana deal was that it was an “interim” arrangement to address urgent issues, not a permanent partition of Syria, he said.

De Mistura said the Astana talks had also made rapid progress on agreements covering prisoner releases and de-mining, and both were almost complete.

Egeland said he could point to one concrete result from Astana: the reported reduction in fighting and aerial attacks. But aid convoys were only being allowed in at the rate of one per week, with no permission letters coming from the government.

Although some recent local surrenders meant the number of people who were hard to reach with aid had fallen by 10 percent to 4.5 million, a further 625,000 were besieged – 80 percent of them by forces loyal to Assad, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay)

Leading Hamas official says no softened stance toward Israel

FILE PHOTO: Veteran Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar gestures during an interview with Reuters at his house in Gaza City April 29, 2014. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – One of Hamas’s most senior officials said on Wednesday a document published by the Islamist Palestinian group last week was not a substitute for its founding charter, which advocates Israel’s destruction.

Speaking in Gaza City, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a regular critic of Israel, said the political policy document announced in Qatar on May 1 by Hamas’s outgoing chief Khaled Meshaal did not contradict its founding covenant, published in 1988.

Trailed for weeks by Hamas officials, the document appeared to be an attempt to soften the group’s language toward Israel. But it still called for “the liberation of all of historical Palestine”, said armed resistance was a means to achieve that goal, and did not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

“The pledge Hamas made before God was to liberate all of Palestine,” Zahar said on Wednesday. “The charter is the core of (Hamas’s) position and the mechanism of this position is the document.”

Many Western countries classify Hamas as a terrorist group over its failure to renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.

In its new document, Hamas said it agrees to a transitional Palestinian state within frontiers pre-dating the 1967 Middle East war but continues to oppose recognizing Israel’s right to exist and backs an armed struggle.

Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah movement that controls the Israeli-occupied West Bank, recognizes Israel and seeks a final peace agreement based on those lines.

U.S. President Donald Trump will meet Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the region later this month, and a summit to restart peace talks stalled since 2014 has been mentioned in media reports.

Zahar denied that Hamas was trying to align itself with Fatah’s position.

“When people say that Hamas has accepted the 1967 borders, like others, it is an offense to us,” he said.

“We have reaffirmed the unchanging constant principles that we do not recognize Israel; we do not recognize the land occupied in 1948 as belonging to Israel and we do not recognize that the people who came here (Jews) own this land.

“Therefore, there is no contradiction between what we said in the document and the pledge we have made to God in our (original) charter,” Zahar added.

On Sunday, Netanyahu symbolically tossed Hamas’s “hateful document” into a waste paper bin and said the group was trying to fool the world.

(Editing by Ori Lewis and Catherine Evans)

Uganda seeks $2 billion for South Sudan refugees at planned summit

South Sudanese refugee families displaced by fighting gather at Imvepi settlement in Arua district, northern Uganda, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/James Akena

By Elias Biryabarema

KAMPALA (Reuters) – Uganda hopes to raise $2 billion in donations at a U.N. refugee summit next month to help fund relief operations for refugees flowing in from neighboring South Sudan, Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda said on Tuesday.

The east African country hosts a total of 1.2 million refugees, of which almost 800,000 are South Sudanese who fled the world’s youngest country since the outbreak of civil war.

Rugunda said Uganda faced difficulties in coping with the influx, which ballooned recently since the latest wave of violence erupted in July.

“The … numbers are placing a huge strain on our already stressed ability to cater for food,” he told a news conference.

“We are hoping that … we will be able to raise $2 billion from the summit,” he said in Kampala, where the U.N.-hosted gathering is set to be held.

The conflict in the oil-producing country began when President Salva Kiir fired his deputy Riek Machar in 2013, two years after the country won independence from neighboring Sudan.

The fighting that followed split the country along ethnic lines, spurred hyperinflation and plunged parts of the nation into famine, creating Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The latest bout of warfare erupted in July, less than a year after both sides signing a peace pact in 2015.

Rugunda said the money Kampala sought to raise from the summit would fund relief operations for the next twelve months from June.

Uganda has won plaudits for its liberal refugee policy that maintains open borders and allocates land plots to individual refugee families.

Kampala also grants refugees free movement and employment in the country, as well as some public services such as free education and healthcare.

Rugunda said Uganda expected an additional 400,000 refugees to arrive in the country this year “because of the recurring cycles of insecurity and instability in the region.”

(This version of the story corrects prime minister’s name to Rugunda in first, 3rd paras.)

(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Aaron Maasho and Tom Heneghan)

U.S. decision to arm Syrian Kurds threatens Turkey: foreign minister

FILE PHOTO: Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG) head a convoy of U.S military vehicles in the town of Darbasiya next to the Turkish border, Syria April 28, 2017. REUTERS/Rodi Said/File Photo

By Tulay Karadeniz and Tuvan Gumrukcu

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey urged the United States on Wednesday to reverse a decision to arm Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State (IS) in Syria, saying every weapon supplied to the YPG militia constituted “a threat to Turkey”.

The angry reply came a week before President Tayyip Erdogan is due in Washington for his first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, who approved the arms supply to support a campaign to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from Islamic State.

Turkey views the YPG as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984 and is considered a terrorist group by the United States, Turkey and Europe.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, speaking while on a visit to Montenegro, said weapons supplied to the YPG had in the past fallen into PKK hands.

“Both the PKK and YPG are terrorist organizations and they are no different apart from their names,” he told a televised news conference. “Every weapon seized by them is a threat to Turkey.”

The United States sees the YPG as a valuable partner in the fight against Islamic State militants in northern Syria, and says that arming the Kurdish forces is necessary to retaking the city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria and a hub for planning attacks against the West.

The YPG said Washington’s decision would bring swift results and help the militia “play a stronger, more influential and more decisive role in combating terrorism”.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday it was aware of concerns in Turkey, a NATO ally that has given vital support to a U.S.-led campaign against IS in Syria and Iraq. Jets carrying out air strikes against IS have flown from Turkey’s Incirlik air base.

Erdogan has not yet responded to Trump’s decision, but has repeatedly castigated Washington for its support of the YPG.

Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said the United States should review its decision. “We hope the U.S. administration will put a stop to this wrong and turn back from it,” he said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster A Haber.

“Such a policy will not be beneficial, you can’t be in the same sack as terrorist organizations.”

LIMITED OPTIONS

Ankara has argued that Washington should switch support for the Raqqa assault from the YPG to Syrian rebels Turkey has trained and led against Islamic State for the past year – despite Washington’s scepticism about their military capability.

“There is no reality in the comments that a ground operation against Daesh (Islamic State) can only be successful with the YPG. I hope they turn back from this mistake,” Canikli said.

Despite the angry language, Erdogan’s government has little chance of reversing Washington’s decision, and any retaliatory move would come at a cost.

Cavusoglu said Trump would discuss the issue with Trump during his planned May 16-17 visit to Washington, suggesting there were no plans to call off the talks in protest.

“Turkey doesn’t have much room to move here,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and analyst at Carnegie Europe. “I think Washington made such an evaluation when taking this decision.”

While Turkey could impose limits on the use of the Incirlik base, that would hamper operations against Islamic State, which also menaces Turkey itself and has claimed responsibility for attacks including the bombing of Istanbul airport.

Turkey could also step up air strikes on PKK targets in northern Iraq. Turkish warplanes attacked Kurdish YPG fighters in northeastern Syria and Iraq’s Sinjar region late last month.

But Cavusoglu and Canikli both pointed to a diplomatic, rather than military, response to Trump’s decision.

“We are carrying out, and will carry out, all necessary diplomatic communications,” Canikli said. “Our wish is that the U.S. stops this wrong and does what is mandated by our friendship.”

(Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Daren Butler in Istanbul; editing by Dominic Evans and Mark Heinrich)

Families pour out of Mosul as Iraqi troops push into last militant-held areas

Displaced Iraqis get out of a military truck as Iraqi forces battle with Islamic State militants, in western Mosul, Iraq May 10, 2017. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Isabel Coles

HAMMAM AL-ALIL CAMP, Iraq (Reuters) – Thousands more people are fleeing Mosul every day since Iraqi troops began their push into the last Islamic State-held areas of the city last week, with food and water running out and the fighting killing increasing numbers of civilians.

More than 22,000 people have fled Mosul since the U.S.-backed forces opened a new front in the northwest of the city on May 4 to try to finally dislodge the militants, the United Nations said on Wednesday, citing Iraqi government figures.

In the past two days alone, more than 11,000 people have passed through a screening site at the Hammam al-Alil camp south of Mosul.

Islamic State fighters are shooting people who try to escape, although some men have been allowed to go in exchange for taking militants’ families with them, said 40-year-old Umm Abdul Rahman, who fled the Musherfa district on Tuesday night.

One man waiting to be checked by security at Hammam al Alil had streaks of blood on his clothes from carrying a woman hit by an Islamic State sniper.

They join an exodus from Mosul of more than 600,000 people in the seven months since Iraqi forces began their offensive there. Roughly 400,000 of those are from the western side of the city which is bisected by the River Tigris.

The militants are now besieged in the northwestern corner, which includes the historic Old City center, the medieval Grand al-Nuri Mosque, and its landmark leaning minaret where their black flag has been flying since June 2014.

About ten families, some forced out of other areas of Mosul as Iraqi forces advanced, were now crammed into every house in the northwest, Abdul Rahman said.

“There is no water, no food. The bombardment is continuous,” she said, and the militants were setting civilian cars and trucks on fire to create smokescreens.

People are surviving on ground wheat boiled in water, 31-year-old Qatra al-Nada Abdullah said, because Islamic State fighters were keeping any food or water that is left for themselves.

“Even wheat is scarce,” she said.

Islamic State fighters are forcing people from their homes to use them as fighting positions, 62-year-old Umm Mohammed said as she clutched a packet of cigarettes forbidden under the militants’ rule.

She and her family had burned everything, even their own shoes, to cook over after fuel ran out.

“We saw fear and hunger and death. I am an old woman and I have never seen anything like this.”

The Sunni Muslim militants seized Mosul in a shock offensive across northern and western Iraq in 2014 but have lost much of that territory to resurgent government forces in the past year. The campaign to recapture the city, Iraq’s second largest, began last October.

Defeat in Mosul, the militants’ last urban stronghold in the country, would still leave Islamic State in control of swathes of Syria and Iraqi territory near the Syrian border.

(Reporting by Isabel Coles; Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Qatar says Syria ‘de-escalation’ plan not an alternative to political transition

Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attends a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, in this file photo dated April 15, 2017. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

DOHA (Reuters) – Qatar’s foreign minister on Tuesday welcomed a Russian-brokered agreement for “de-escalation” zones in Syria but said the plan was no substitute for a political transition that would see President Bashar al-Assad step down.

Qatar has been a supporter of rebels who have been fighting to overthrow the Syrian president during six years of civil war.

“It is good to have de-escalation zones but this must be a step to reach a solution to the Syrian crisis and not to use it as an excuse to delay this solution and to postpone the political transition,” the Qatari foreign ministry quoted Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani as telling the Doha-based al-Jazeera network.

The remarks came after talks between the Qatari minister and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Washington.

Russia brokered the deal for de-escalation zones with backing from Iran and opposition supporter Turkey during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital Astana last week. The deal took effect at midnight on Friday.

Some fighting has continued in those areas, particularly north of Hama city, but the overall intensity has reduced, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

(Reporting by Tom Finn, writing by Sami Aboudi, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Civilians complicate final phase of Mosul campaign: U.S. commander

Smoke is seen as members of the Iraqi forces clash with Islamic State fighters on a frontline in north west of Mosul, Iraq, May 8, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

By Ahmed Aboulenein

SOUTHWEST OF MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – The Islamic State fighters herded a group of civilians into a house in the city of Mosul and locked them inside as Iraqi forces advanced. Moments later, the militants entered through a window, lay low for a few minutes, then fired their weapons.

The plan was simple. They would draw attention to the house by firing from the windows, then move to an adjacent building through a hole in the wall, in hope of goading coalition jets flying above to strike the house.

What the militants did not realize was that U.S. advisers partnered with Iraqi troops were watching the whole thing on an aerial drone feed. No air strike was called – and the propaganda coup Islamic State would have reaped from the deaths of innocent people was averted.

“We automatically knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to bait us into destroying this building,” said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel James Browning. “This is the game that we play, this is the challenge that we go through every day.”

The challenge is only increasing as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces squeeze the militants into a smaller and smaller area of Mosul, where they are now trapped along with several hundred thousand civilians.

“There is nowhere to go…. the battlefield is much more complicated with the amount of civilians that are moving,” Browning said.

The risks are high: more than 100 civilians were accidentally killed in a single airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in March.

FINAL PHASE

After opening up a new front in northwest Mosul last week in order to stretch the militants’ defenses, Iraqi forces say the battle for Mosul is now in its final phase.

U.S. servicemen are visible near the frontlines advising the Iraqis as they advance into the last handful of districts controlled by Islamic State, facing a barrage of suicide car bombs and sniper fire.

Browning, a battalion commander from the 82nd Airborne Division, is one of more than 5,000 U.S. service members currently deployed in Iraq to “advise and assist” security forces that collapsed when Islamic State overran Mosul nearly three summers ago.

It is a much smaller footprint than the 170,000 troops deployed at the height of the nine-year occupation that followed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, during which more than 4,000 American soldiers were killed.

Having extricated U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, the White House is loath to re-enter a costly conflict that would prove unpopular with the public.

For Browning, who was deployed to Iraq in 2008, the nature of the U.S. role is clearly different.

“Whereas before it was me leading fights and I would ask my Iraqi partners to come with me, now… he leads the fight and I follow him,” he said. “The biggest difference is that we are no longer in a combat role.”

Since the Mosul offensive began last October, the U.S. role has evolved so that American forces are now partnered with Iraqi troops at a lower level, reducing the time it takes them to respond to Islamic State.

That means company commanders under Browning are also partnered with brigade commanders who report to his Iraqi opposite number, Lieutenant General Qassem al-Maliki.

They hold daily discussions on operations and determine what U.S. forces can do to help, which may involve providing imagery, intelligence, air strikes, or ground fire.

The Iraqis also provide human intelligence that the U.S. forces will corroborate in order to identify targets and determine the best approach to attacking them.

Browning lives on the same base as Maliki, commander of the Iraqi 9th division, making it easier to finetune battle plans.

“Everything I am trying to do is try to shape the battlefield for him”.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Isabel Coles and Mark Trevelyan)

Nigeria exchanges 82 Chibok girls kidnapped by Boko Haram for prisoners

A group of 82 Chibok girls, who were held captive for three years by Islamist militants, wait to be released in exchange for several militant commanders, near Kumshe, Nigeria May 6, 2017. REUTERS/Zanah Mustapha

By Felix Onuah and Ahmed Kingimi

ABUJA/MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants have released 82 schoolgirls out of a group of more than 200 whom they kidnapped from the northeastern town of Chibok three years ago in exchange for prisoners, the presidency said on Saturday.

Around 270 girls were kidnapped in April 2014 by the Islamist militant group, which has killed 15,000 people and displaced more than two million during a seven-year insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria.

Dozens escaped in the initial melee, but more than 200 remained missing for more than two years.

Nigeria thanked Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross for helping secure the release of the 82 girls after “lengthy negotiations”, the presidency said in a statement.

President Muhammadu Buhari will receive the girls on Sunday afternoon in the capital Abuja, it said, without saying how many Boko Haram suspects had been exchanged or disclosing other details.

A military source said the girls were brought on Sunday morning from Banki near the Cameroon border to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state where the insurgency started.

The release of the girls may give a boost to Buhari who has hardly appeared in public since returning from Britain in March for treatment of an unspecified illness.

He made crushing the insurgency a pillar of his election campaign in 2015.

The army has retaken most of the territory initially lost to the militants but attacks and suicide bombings by the group have made it nearly impossible for displaced persons to return to their recaptured hometowns.

“The President directed the security agencies to continue in earnest until all the Chibok girls have been released and reunited with their families,” the presidency said.

INSECURITY

More than 20 girls were released last October in a deal brokered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Others have escaped or been rescued, but 195 were believed to be still in captivity.

Buhari said last month that the government was in talks to secure the release of the remaining captives.

Although the Chibok girls are the most high-profile case, Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands of adults and children, many of whose cases have been neglected.

Although the army has retaken much of the territory initially lost to Boko Haram, large parts of the northeast, particularly in Borno state, remain under threat from the militants. Suicide bombings and gun attacks have increased in the region since the end of the rainy season late last year.

Some 4.7 million people in northeast Nigeria depend on food aid, some of which is blocked by militant attacks, some held up by a lack of funding and some, diplomats say, stolen before it can reach those in need.

Millions of Nigerians may soon be in peril if the situation deteriorates, as authorities expect, when the five-month rainy season begins in May and makes farming impossible in areas that are now accessible.

This part of Nigeria is the western edge of an arc of hunger stretching across the breadth of Africa through South Sudan, Somalia and into Yemen on the Arabian peninsula. The United Nations believes as many as 20 million people are in danger in what could become the world’s worst famine for decades.

(Additional reporting by Tife Owolabi and Ulf Laessing; editing by Angus MacSwan and Jason Neely)

If London were Aleppo – Buckingham Palace destroyed, 4.3 million dead or displaced

People view sunrise in London, Britain, January 13, 2017. REUTERS/Toby Melville

BERLIN (Reuters) – The bullet-riddled, bombed-out buildings of Aleppo may bear little resemblance to London’s gleaming skyscrapers but the two cities once had much in common, something German artist Hans Hack has seized on to bring home the reality of war.

Before Syria’s six-year civil war, Aleppo — like London — was its country’s biggest city, as well as a key commercial hub. But, unlike teeming London, half of Aleppo is now effectively a ghost town.

To bring the suffering home to those in Europe, data visualizer Hack has used United Nations satellite data of Aleppo’s destruction and created equivalent maps of London and Berlin.

“For me it’s hard to understand in the news what it means, how strongly Aleppo was destroyed. I wanted to take this information and project it onto something I know personally that I can have some reference to. So I chose Berlin and London,” hack told Reuters.

London suffered the same damage as Aleppo, entire neighborhoods would be wiped off the map — in this alternative reality, Buckingham Palace, the Olympic stadium and the tower of London are all rubble.

It’s an echo of what happened in Aleppo. When the Syrian army captured the city from rebels in December 2016, the area was in ruins.

What the map doesn’t show are the human casualties. Since Syria’s civil war began the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that Aleppo’s population fell from 2 million to 1.3 million just after people started returning to the city.

A drop of similar proportions in London would see about 4.3 million people killed or displaced.

Feras al-Shehabi, chairman of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry, told Reuters in February that his city’s situation was “very similar to Berlin in 1946 or Tokyo in 1946. So you have a destroyed city.”

Still, Hack is reluctant to compare modern-day Aleppo with the cities ravaged in World War Two.

“I’m reluctant to draw parallels with history because I don’t think you can directly compare the way people have suffered. But I can imagine those who remember what it was like then (World War Two) don’t need a map like this,” he said.

(Reporting by Sreerk Heinz, writing by Rosanna Philpott in London Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)