Murder came from a cloudy sky. The shells that exploded on the pavement of a main Aleppo thoroughfare on Monday killed people in grimly familiar style, chopping up a group of four men, all civilian, in a way so grotesque that I cannot describe it here, though amid the blood and screams of a woman each detail was branded clearly on my mind.
Everything in the manner of their death — the random, casual nature of its award, as careless as a splash from a roadside puddle; the way the mutilated bodies were slung on a flatbed truck like butchered livestock — was so commonplace in that city as to be almost mundane. But there was something novel and ominous in the state of the