SATELLITE images have laid bare the staggering extent of the devastation of the Syrian city of Aleppo after more than four years of brutal street fighting and aerial bombardments.
Tens of thousands of homes and apartments are uninhabitable, most factories have been looted or destroyed and some ancient landmarks have been reduced to rubble.
Reconstruction will likely take years and cost tens of billions of dollars, experts say. Some of Aleppo's centuries-old cultural heritage may have been lost for good.
And healing the wounds in a city once split between a wealthier, pro-government west and a poorer, pro-rebel east could take even greater effort.
Damage assessments emerged as the Syrian government yesterday announced that it had assumed full control of the city a significant victory in a nearly six-year battle with an armed opposition trying to unseat President Bashar Assad.
Located at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, Aleppo was Syria's biggest city before the war, with more than 3 million residents and a world-famous cuisine.
It served as the country's industrial hub, home to factories producing textiles, plastics and pharmaceuticals. Its ancient center, recognized as a World Heritage site, drew large numbers of tourists.
Today, Aleppo "resembles those cities that were stricken during World War II," said Maamoun Abdul-Karim, head of the government's museums and archaeology department.
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The scale of devastation has already evoked comparisons with cities like Grozny and Dresden.
But the destruction isn't spread evenly.
Areas once held by the opposition suffered severe damage after being bombarded for months by Syrian and Russian warplanes. Some eastern neighborhoods look like they have been hit by an earthquake.
In parts of the government-held west, life seemed almost normal. Children attended schools, adults went to work and restaurants and coffee shops were packed.
Crude weapons used by the rebels, including mortars and home-made "hell cannons," caused some damage and casualties in government-held areas closer to the front lines.
U.N. satellite images identified more than 33,500 damaged residential buildings in the city, with the most recent photos taken in mid-September, according to a map published this week.
A majority of the buildings would have been multi-unit apartment blocks common in Aleppo, said Olivier Vandamme, an official at the U.N. agency that provided the map.
The map indicated that the most intense damage occurred in rebel-held areas.
The analysis only considered residential areas and excluded industrial zones.
After the images were taken, the Syrian government and its allies intensified bombardments in the final phase of the Aleppo offensive.
A Syrian urban consultant said Aleppo had a pre-war stock of about 550,000 housing units, with a total value of about $50 billion.
The fighting in the city may have caused close to $25 billion in loss of housing, said the consultant, who is involved in data collection and requested anonymity because of what he said was a highly politicized debate over the scope of destruction.
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