INSIDE ALEPPO: Syria’s most war-torn city

Three years of carnage has turned the city mentioned by Shakespeare in Macbeth into a Stalingrad, writes JAMES HARKIN

On June 15, dozens of blue metal gas canisters fell from the sky and slammed into the streets of western Aleppo, Syria. “It was raining gas canisters,” recalls a shopkeeper.

Locals here know them well and call them jarra. Filled with nails, ball bearings and crude explosives, the modified domestic propane cylinders are fired from homemade howitzers the rebels have dubbed “hell cannons” and have a range of less than a mile.