'Remember that there was once a city called Aleppo that the world erased from history'

As ever in the battle for Aleppo, the absence of independent foreign reporters makes it difficult to verify just exactly what happened to that evacuee convoy.

For some time now Syrian government forces and rebels alike have often gone to great lengths to ensure the outside world is presented with their own version of events.

“The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria has many negative consequences,” veteran Middle East reporter, Patrick Cockburn rightly pointed out a few days ago.

Nowhere are those negative consequences more damaging than in their impact on efforts to establish a clear understanding of the extent of atrocities and war crimes committed in the struggle for Aleppo and across the wider civil war in Syria.

After more than five years of fighting, and given the systematic targetting of the civilian population, few human rights groups doubt that widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.

“Throughout the conflict Syrian government forces, backed by Russia, have repeatedly displayed a callous disregard for international humanitarian law and utter disdain for the fate of civilians,” says Lynn Maalouf, Research Deputy Director at Amnesty International’s Beirut office.

“In fact, they have regularly targeted civilians as a strategy, both during military operations and through the mass-scale use of arbitrary detention, disappearances and torture and other ill-treatment,” Maalouf added.

Over the last week or so as Syrian government forces and their foreign militia allies closed on the city, yet more shocking reports from the United Nations surfaced, indicating that scores of civilians have been extrajudicially executed in eastern Aleppo pointing to apparent war crimes.

The UN human rights office said it had reliable evidence that up to 82 civilians were massacred in cold blood by government and allied forces who entered their homes, or shot them at checkpoints in the streets.

Most of the victims it is reported had been lined up against walls by pro-government militias and gunned down in the neighbourhoods of Fardous and Saliheen.

“Every hour, butcheries are carried out,” said the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which for some time has used an extensive network of sources on the ground to try and establish an accurate picture of what is happening inside Aleppo and across Syria.

This pattern of information gathering adopted by the Observatory using local sources and the reports of established human rights and humanitarian organisations is perhaps the most reliable way of corroborating the veracity of information surfacing from inside Aleppo.

Western forces are using a similar approach in gathering evidence of alleged atrocities and war crimes with the additional deployment of satellites and unmanned aircraft, the UK government has confirmed.

While the Foreign Office insisted that no UK government drones were operating over Aleppo, it said the Syrian opposition had been trained to collect evidence.

This, along with open source social media and local testimony from activists on the ground, would give investigators something to work with once the fighting stops, so that eventually those guilty might be brought to justice in the international criminal courts.

UK Government sources said the lesson learned from Iraq was to gather information about alleged war crimes as a conflict takes place.

Echoing the frustration of many onlookers, Tobias Ellwood, Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East, said the UN Security Council had “failed” Aleppo by denying UN humanitarian access to the city.

“Russia has gone from supporting siege to supporting slaughter. Yet Russia’s veto will not prevent individuals committing potential crimes against humanity from being held to account,” insisted Ellwood.

Bringing those suspected of such crimes to justice however is easier said than done, not least given the chaotic picture currently emerging from inside Aleppo.

Indications of how desperate things have become for Aleppo’s citizens appeared in the their harrowing 'death bulletins' pleading for help from the outside word that many posted on social media as Syrian forces swept through the city. Terrified residents also filmed themselves describing their plight in the besieged city.

“Please just tell our stories to the world, please let my son be proud of his father,” said one resident of east Aleppo in a text message.

One doctor calling the situation ‘apocalyptic’ described how many children, possibly more than 100, unaccompanied or separated from their families, were trapped in a building, under heavy attack in east Aleppo.

The doctor told of corpses in the street and people attempting to flee to government-held areas as a result of hunger and cold.

“We are besieged from all sides and death is coming from the air,” he said. “Remember that there was once a city called Aleppo that the world erased ... from history. This is a farewell message from a doctor whose fate along with that of his companions is death or arrest at any moment.”

The White Helmets emergency service, which operates not only in Aleppo, but in rebel-held areas across Syria, said it had been unable to pull bodies out from under collapsed buildings because of the ferocity of the bombardment. ‘It’s hell,’ one of its members Tweeted on Tuesday.

With corpses abandoned in the streets and residents too terrified by the shelling to bury them, Jens Laerke, a UN spokesman, said it looked like there had been a “complete meltdown of humanity” in the city.

According to the Observatory, an estimated 130,000 people have poured out of rebel-held neighbourhoods as the Syrian army has advanced.

Photos sent by an activist waiting to leave the rebel-held sector of east Aleppo showed crowds of people in thick coats in a street lined with flattened buildings.

Displaced civilians, many hungry after fleeing without food, sat on pavements or lay on the street with nowhere else to go. Private cars and minibuses with a few meagre belongings strapped to their roofs filled the street, as people sat on rubble or stood next to their bags hoping for a way out.

In a message sent to journalists, the activist said children were “hungry and crying” and people were “exhausted”, not knowing if buses would arrive to take them out of the city.

The lime-green buses that once ferried Syrians to school, work and nights out at Damascus cafes, have become emblematic of forced displacement and a signature of the Syrian government’s starve-or-surrender strategy.

Those who climb aboard in Aleppo are usually offered a choice between two destinations. Both options are bad. They can take the green buses to government territory, where many fear arrest, detention, torture and conscription, or to another rebel-held enclave like Idlib Province.

There they face continued government airstrikes and the possibility of going through their entire traumatic experience all over again.

There are already reports, confirmed by the UN’s commission for human rights, that men of fighting age who have chosen to cross into government controlled territory have gone missing, their whereabouts still unknown by their families.

Human rights groups believe many will have vanished into the nightmarish network of government regime detention centres, where horrific atrocities and abuses have already been well documented.

Some rights groups like the Syrian Institute for Justice led by Abdelkader Mandou, have tasked themselves with collecting evidence of such atrocities and war crimes. Earlier this year the work Abdelkader and his team undertake, was featured by the news network Al Jazeera in a report entitled Syria: Witnesses for the Prosecution.

It was almost four years ago that a Syrian military forensic photographer, known as “Cesar,” defected from the regime, smuggling with him 55,000 photographs, many of which appeared to be of prisoners tortured to death by the Syrian regime.

These were then passed to an activist friend who had been documenting atrocities since the beginning of the revolution.

The Cesar pictures show detainees who had been raped, tortured, starved, suffocated, shot, and murdered and just part of the evidence Abdelkader’s team have uncovered.

Throughout the five years of Syria’s civil war, many ordinary Syrians have been collecting evidence like this of war crimes committed against civilians.

As the Al Jazeera report revealed, they have “recovered military orders, collected bomb fragments, taken toxic samples, filmed mutilated bodies and archived thousands of testimonies to make sure the trace of evidence does not disappear.”

The regime of Syrian President Bashat al-Assad is not the only armed group responsible for atrocities of course. Quite often the threat to locals in Aleppo and other rebel-held areas comes from the opposition militias themselves.

An Amnesty International report entitled Torture Was My Punishment, published earlier this year, highlighted the fate of one young man called “Issa” who had failed to abide by the rules laid down by the armed rebel group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

“I was taken to the torture room. They placed me in the shabeh position, hanging me from the ceiling from my wrists so that my toes were off the ground. Then they started beating me with cables all over my body… after the shabeh they used the dulab (tyre) technique. They folded my body and forced me to go inside a tyre and then started beating me with wooden sticks,” Issa recalled.

Many groups on both sides of the Syrian civil war have used illegal detention, torture, force displacement and carried out extrajudicial killings

But clearly superior firepower, especially airstrikes, have allowed the regime to inflict horrendous suffering on huge numbers of people in urban and built up areas. Human rights observers point to forms of collective punishment using barrel bombs, toxic gas and forced starvation.

Again here too rebel groups have used what heavy weapons they have to achieve similar ends, including mortars and Katyusha rockets, in the vicinity of densely populated civilian areas in west Aleppo.

These attacks are as much a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law as those carried out by the regime in the east of the city.

While the world’s attention of late has focussed on Aleppo, the plight of civilians in many other parts of Syria who have been exposed to atrocities has gone comparatively unnoticed.

According to a recent report by Siege Watch, a monitor run by joint US and Netherlands based research teams, some 1.3 million people are besieged in Syria.

In all, at least 39 communities remain under siege either by government forces and their allies or by rebel groups, including the town of Madaya which drew the world’s attention, albeit briefly last year, when harrowing photographs emerged of its malnourished citizens.

According to the report, the Syrian government and its allies remain “responsible for the majority of existing sieges”.

With eastern Aleppo city as well as Douma in rural Damascus and al-Waer in Homs, Madaya is one of the four communities cited in the report as in need of “immediate and unfettered international assistance to prevent looming humanitarian catastrophes”.

As Siege Watch points out, “the deliberate starvation of civilians is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and therefore a war crime”.

Its observers also point to a major shift in the siege tactics of government forces moving from a “surrender or starve” to “surrender or die” strategy.

To date more than 500,000 Syrians have been slaughtered, 6 million people displaced internally, and another 5 million forced to flee as refugees across neighbouring borders in nearly six years of civil war in Syria.

Yesterday, there were reports of a new deal to secure the complete evacuation of Aleppo. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the evacuation could start straight away after an agreement that two villages besieged by rebels will also be evacuated. The situation however remains volatile, uncertain and for most civilians precarious.

The former British foreign secretary David Miliband, now president of the US-based charity International Rescue - which still has aid workers in Aleppo - warned of “house-to-house murder” still being carried out and expressed fears that the carnage could spread to Idlib.

“The truth is there’s chaos, people are looking to find their families and people are reporting ... that the ceasefire is holding; others that there is no safety at all and it’s sheer terror,” said Miliband.

For now Syria’s evidence hunters continue to have their work cut out pulling together the photographs and physical evidence of atrocities and war crimes in Aleppo and elsewhere, they hope that one day will help bring the perpetrators to justice and punishment.

“At the moment, our work is not stopping the destruction nor the attacks, but the day will come when they can. On that day, we will prove the crimes of the torturers and they won't escape judgement,” promises Abdelkader Mandou, the director of the Syrian Institute for Justice.

As Aleppo continues to burn and its citizens suffer unimaginably, that day sadly remains some way off yet.