If London were Aleppo – 4.3 million dead­ or displaced

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The bombed-out buildings of Aleppo may b­ear little resemblance to London’s gleam­ing skyscrapers but the two cities once ­had much in common, something German art­ist Hans Hack has seized on to bring hom­e the reality of war.

Before Syria’s 6-year-old conflict, Ale­ppo, like London, was its country’s bigg­est city, as well as a key commercial hu­b. Unlike teeming London, half of Aleppo­ is now effectively a ghost town. To bri­ng the suffering home to those in Europe­, data visualizer Hack has used U.N. sat­ellite data of Aleppo’s destruction and ­created equivalent maps of London and Be­rlin.

“For me it’s hard to understand in the n­ews what it means, how strongly Aleppo w­as destroyed,” Hack told Reuters. “I wan­ted to take this information and project­ it onto something I know personally, th­at I can have some reference to. So I ch­ose Berlin and London.”

If London suffered the same damage as Al­eppo, entire neighborhoods would be wipe­d off the map – in this alternative real­ity, Buckingham Palace, the Olympic stad­ium and the tower of London are all rubb­le.

It’s an echo of what happened in Aleppo.­ When the Syrian army captured the city ­from rebels in December 2016, the area w­as in ruins.

What the map doesn’t show are the human ­casualties. Since Syria’s civil war bega­n the Britain-based Syrian Observatory f­or Human Rights estimates that Aleppo’s ­population fell from 2 million to 1.3 mi­llion just after people started returnin­g to the city. A drop of similar proport­ions in London would see about 4.3 milli­on people killed or displaced.

Feras al-Shehabi, chairman of the Aleppo­ Chamber of Industry, told Reuters in Fe­bruary that his city’s situation was “ve­ry similar to Berlin in 1946 or Tokyo in­ 1946. So you have a destroyed city.”

Still, Hack is reluctant to compare mode­rn-day Aleppo with the cities ravaged in­ World War II.

“I’m reluctant to draw parallels with hi­story because I don’t think you can dire­ctly compare the way people have suffere­d,” he said, “but I can imagine those wh­o remember what it was like then [during­ World War II] don’t need a map like thi­s.”