Just over a decade ago, at the height of Russia’s bombing campagn in Syria in 2015, an old friend who had spent much of his career teaching in the Middle East sent me two photographs of the city of Homs, which had taken a particularly heavy bombardment at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s warplanes.
One of the pictures, which had been taken some years previously, was of a cafe on the centre of this city of 1.3 million. It was packed with smiling, well-dressed young men and women and hinted at a vibrant cafe culture in Syria’s third-largest city. The other was an aerial photograph downloaded from contemporaneous news reports which my friend confirmed was the street on which that cafe had sat. It was now nothing but rubble.
