'There was no sign of any living thing': Journalist Nelofer Pazira takes us inside Aleppo
*Warning: Some of the content in this post may be disturbing.*
Evacuations from the last Syrian rebel-held enclave in eastern Aleppo have begun again. UN officials report a convoy of some 60 buses filled with desperate residents have streamed out of the devastated neighbourhood.
Afghan-Canadian journalist and fillmmaker Nelofer Pazira has been travelling in and out of the war-ravaged city for four years. In early November, she visited government-controlled western Aleppo, including several neighbourhoods that had recently been held by the rebel forces.
"It was a totally abandoned place," Pazira tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
"It was really eerie because there was no sound. There was no sign of any living thing … Not even animals or dogs or birds or anything was moving. There was just nothing."
Pazira was filming at the time. Destroyed buildings stretched in every direction for as far as the eye could see. She tellsTremonti that she has been to many war zones over the years but she had never seen so much destruction before.
"At one point, I just stopped filming," she explains, adding that she decided on the spot that she would write about the experience instead because a camera frame could not capture the scale of devastation that she witnessed and experienced.
Pazira shares her experience with Tremonti when she visited a neighbourhood French school that had been shelled during the fighting.
"I walked up five floors over the blood of the kids who had been evacuated."
Pazira explains she could see the teacher's lessons still scrawled on the board in front of the overturned desks and chairs.
"And then when I came downstairs, I saw this one man wearing a white garment. He had a clear plastic bag in his hands. And he was going around collecting body parts."
When visiting a hospital later and seeing the families of the children who died at the school, Pazira says she couldn't bring herself to go speak to them.
"I actually started to take a few pictures and then I stopped," she says.
"As a journalist, I want to witness it and I want to record it, but I just felt there was no way I could justify to take pictures of these grieving families."
Pazira said she tries to be optimistic but witnessing that level of devastation — to the city itself and the families who lived in it — it's hard to imagine how Aleppo can ever rebuild itself.
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's John Chipman.