What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War.Īs then, this battle was waged against an enemy bent on overthrowing an entire order, in an apparently nihilistic putsch against reason itself. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State.
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