In Syria at war, a white streak constellated the night sky above the ruins of the deserted city of Ariha, devastated by violence.
The appearance on Saturday before dawn of the Milky Way, a rare phenomenon that occurs especially in summer by moonless sky, created a striking contrast between sky and earth, immortalized by an AFP photographer through long exposure photos.
Under this vast cloud of stars, the skeletons of buildings, the rubble, the gutted facades and roofs seem all the more appalling.
The city, perched in a mountainous region of the province of Idleb called “Jabal al-Arba’in”, has long been a popular tourist site in Syria. Pine trees, hotels, restaurants: the sweet life that once reigned there attracted many visitors.
Now deserted, it was the subject at the start of the year, like other localities and surrounding towns, of a vast offensive by the Syrian regime, supported by the Russian air force, to take it back from the jihadists. of the Hayat Tahrir al-Cham group (HTS, former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda) and secure a strategic highway (M4), pushing its approximately 70,000 inhabitants to flee en masse to safer areas.
But the city, devastated, remained in the hands of HTS and the nightmare does not seem finished.
More than nine years after the start of the war, Ariha and the region of Idleb, the last jihadist bastion and rebel escaping Damascus power, remain in the crosshairs of the regime despite a fragile ceasefire that came into effect in March.
The conflict in Syria, started in 2011 by the suppression of pro-democracy protests by Damascus, has already killed more than 380,000 people – including more than 115,000 civilians – and forced millions to flee.
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