On the Road to Aleppo Where People Have Abandoned all in the Shadow of Isis

It’s strange how the visual disconnect interrupts you as you speed down the bumpy, pot-holed road. Where have all the people gone, I kept asking myself? Why are those who live here not rebuilding their homes? And then I remembered the thousands of Syrian refugees I saw and met streaming through the hot cornfields of northern Greece last summer en route to Macedonia, and the pictures of those tens of thousands walking the frozen railway tracks north to Germany, and of course it made sense. This is the midden which those people left, the “Ground Zero” they abandoned.