Aleppo Was Already Gone

Imagine being trapped inside a city that’s already dead, holding a rifle against a government army on one side, religious extremists on the other, criminal gangs in between, with no clear idea of who’s winning or what winning would even mean. This was Aleppo in 2014—once one of Syria’s great commercial cities, now rubble and competing occupation zones while the world spent its energy debating what to call the conflict.

I’ve always had time for the documentaries VICE News makes, even knowing that the style invites criticism. The camera positions the reporters as participants, the aesthetic runs on controlled chaos, and there’s an angle that casts Western journalists as the most reliable witnesses to other people’s wars. Some of that criticism lands. But the footage coming out of Aleppo is what footage from Aleppo looks like: ruins, checkpoints, men in doorways doing probability calculations that aren’t in their favor, artillery that never quite stops.

Their five-part series Ghosts of Aleppo follows fighters from the Free Syrian Army—not regime forces, not the extremist factions, but the middle ground that nobody ever knows what to do with—defending what’s left of the city against everyone else. Control Aleppo, the logic goes, and you hold leverage over the whole country. So everyone is there, and most of the city isn’t anymore.

There’s a point in war journalism where the politics stop mattering and you just start watching the specific person on screen, the one who lives or doesn’t. VICE gets there faster than most, for better or worse.