Syria’s seventh circle of hell (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

It has been five years, since Syria began its slow, agonizing descent into an inferno that makes Dante’s seventh circle of hell with its river of boiling blood and barren burning sands ignited by flakes of fire, look like a tolerable trail. Aleppo, Syria’s largest and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, is about to fall into the hands of invaders from the East; Russians who are raining fires from the skies, and on the ground cutting swaths of desolation are Iranian-led Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militias and the disheveled forces of their local lisping and pathetically delusional satrap holed up in Damascus.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/02/20/Syria-s-seventh-circle-of-hell.html