there has always had very close links to Turkey. And Aleppo , when it got caught up in the war, it was natural for it to redevelop its trading routes and relocate its factories into Turkey, just like so much of the industry and businesses around Damascus relocated to Lebanon.
And so he engineered an attack like this, and then showed it to the media, and showed his own army coming in to save the inhabitants, And Aleppo , this is Aleppo before the fall of it, obviously.
of the architecture. And it has patterns. Like the mosque in Aleppo , the floor is full of different golden paintings, like a whole set of superb Mondrians covering the floor. And from there you leave.
But I'll just give you one example. In the Aleppo area-- which is in northern Syria-- last year, a bunch of guys in the Syrian free army downloaded a bunch of instructions off the internet and started producing their own mortar systems, which they used Google Android phones to control.
One was a garage mechanic, another at a little cell phone shop in Aleppo . And they were pushed out of Aleppo by the fighting to a town called Manbij. ISIS took over Manbij.
And so he engineered an attack like this, and then showed it to the media, and showed his own army coming in to save the inhabitants, And his tomb is inside the Aleppo Umayyad mosque.
Sothis obscura seems to be an atlas of the present but I'm looking here at church of st. Simeon the skylight in Syria which is just outside of Aleppo which probably doesn't stand anymore and you were talking about the gates of Hell being closed how do you feel about your Atlas becoming an atlas of the past rather than the present
we're among friends, I can be honest, is I'm the most important person in the world. much more important than the bombing of Aleppo and those people caught in that
And so he engineered an attack like this, and then showed it to the media, and showed his own army coming in to save the inhabitants, And this is a picture of two archeology students from Aleppo University.
those who are most different than the rulers and and not just different now but far away do can we look at a child in Aleppo who has been bombed and is dying in Syria and have as much compassion for that child as we would
Basically, after 12 years of doing this, he had gotten a bit tired. He did preserve the masters of Homs and Aleppo before the war.
in case there are crop failures, or-- as is happening now in Syria-- a terrible war raging. And when the seed bank in Syria had to move from Aleppo to Beirut, they had to leave a lot of their seeds behind. So they had deposited seeds in this doomsday vault.
So this is taking me back to November 2016 and I was, as you said, in the stages of founding my startup CanDo at the time, and Aleppo , our second biggest city in the North of Syria, at the time, was besieged and being heavily bombarded. I don't know if you remember it from the news.
So a lot of the physical environment that we either live in, work in is still going to be here in 50 years' time, right? I mean, can you imagine Aleppo , a 1,000-year-old city, is still alive today. It's been bashed about, there have been multiple wars, and this is just another one to add to its history.
These days, you have Russian journalists and Iranian journalists, who cover the angles that they want covered. And it was very, very clear during the Aleppo campaign that that's precisely what was going on. The Assad regime doesn't invite journalists in unless it's got something that wants to show them, which it did just before the fall of Aleppo .
we're among friends, I can be honest, is I'm the most important person in the world. We cannot have this exist. Aleppo ?
Yeah, so it's two family of brothers, Marwan and Radwan. One was a garage mechanic, another at a little cell phone shop in Aleppo . And they were pushed out of Aleppo by the fighting to a town called Manbij.
And you've got a series of armored video cameras that can be replaced if they get broken that allow the thing to basically run through a Go Pro to a Game Boy controller, and the guy drives it around the streets of Aleppo using basically home consumer entertainment technology to control it.
another tank, because it only has a machine gun? Well, the reason is because tanks can't get down streets in a place like Aleppo . A Bradley armored fighting vehicle is about 16 feet wide, so is an Abrams tank.
Another way to use kale. I probably need to add more salt. If you're more of a Western Armenian, you would definitely add maybe Aleppo pepper to this.
It is depressing coming back to Britain, dealing my life in Syria, and Palestine, and global warming. Every single Syrian I know, every single one, particularly those living in refugee camps in places like Turkey, particularly those coming from Aleppo --
with all these, as you can see, very unnatural-looking borders. So historically, Damascus therefore has always had very close links to Lebanon, just like Aleppo right up in the north there has always had very close links to Turkey.
And it was very, very clear during the Aleppo campaign that that's precisely what was going on. The Assad regime doesn't invite journalists in unless it's got something that wants to show them, which it did just before the fall of Aleppo . Because it wanted to show them exactly at that moment how the city was falling and how they were providing was humanitarian aid.
And I traveled down there with a couple friends of mine who started basically a research company, that they bid on government contracts and NGO contracts. down in this city called Gaziantep, which is in Turkey, but it's a 45 minute drive from Aleppo . And one of the fellows who's working for them is this guy named Abed, who was a Syrian activist during the revolution's early days.
to control the fall of shot. But also they downloaded instructions that enabled them to build their own army vehicles, so in a backyard factory in Aleppo last year, a bunch of guys made this thing called al-Shams, which is their lightweight tank that has many mono chassis.