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)
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