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Black Thursday in Aleppo

For more than a decade, similar scenes have become a daily reality in Syria, and particularly in Aleppo. My fellow journalists and I carry indelible memories; from the faces of the dead to the cries of the wounded. I will never forget the image of dead civilians lying in corridors because hospital morgues were too full. As the bodies piled up, they were moved to the sidewalk; left for hours and sometimes days before being buried. Many were never identified – some of them because the severity of the wounds left them beyond recognition.

On that Thursday when I was wounded, we had started our coverage at dawn. We had moved with caution through Aleppo’s Bustan Al Pacha district. Old houses, water fountains and all types of greenery still survived the ferocious fighting and relentless shelling by Russian and regime warplanes. The only sounds we could hear through the day and night were the jetfighters zooming above our heads or barrel bomb explosions.

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