Added to the extremely frigid temperatures this week it is once again snowing. The night before, the thermometer dipped to minus-26 degrees C. and rose to a balmy minus-16 degrees, with a lighter wind quotient than the vicious gusts we experienced on Friday with equally cold temperatures. Last night it was only minus-19 degrees, and this morning when we first took our little dogs out to the backyard it was a relatively mild minus-12 degrees, with snow falling, and just a light wind.

When we look out our front door, this is what we see:

When we look out our patio doors it looks like this:

So we shelter in our warm and comfortable homes, reflecting our safe and secure lives.

We know, from reading the newspapers and on the Internet -- that the ancient historical city of Aleppo in Syria with its fabled past as a primary trading route on the Silk Road -- it is also cold and damp. There, people are sleeping on the streets since their normal shelter in the past of their normal lives is no longer available to them. Men, women and children are daily exposed to thunderous explosions from an ongoing barrage of bombs courtesy of the Syrian military and the fly-by assistance of Russian warplanes.

Thousands of Sunni Syrians have been killed in the last month in Aleppo by the Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al-Assad, a bloody tyrant determined to wrest back all of his imperial territory from the impudent "terrorists" who themselves believe they are opponents of his regime because of the inequalities they have long suffered under a minority Shiite government accustomed to making life miserable for Syria's majority Sunni civilians. During the course of this civil war, a half-million Syrian lives have been snuffed out.

The military onslaught of a destroyed east Aleppo where Sunni Syrians know they are targets, and where they are safe nowhere from the casual and deliberate dropping of barrel bombs, chemical infused bombs and artillery is relentless. Hiding in ancient mosques will not save them, these heritage sites have been bombed into rubble. Health-care providers and their patients have been deliberately targeted along with the hospitals that sought to treat the victims of state violence. Schools for children to attend are no longer viable.

The thought uppermost in their parents' minds was how to feed their children, and keep them from death.

People weep as they are forced to leave their beloved city in east Aleppo. While in the city's western half, curious Alawite defenders of the regime live out their normal lives while witnessing from balconies adjacent the areas being bombarded, the carnage their neighbours suffer.

The sanctimonious 'regrets' and statements of compassion heard from the United Nations and world leaders merely reflect the disinterest of the world at large to intervene forcefully, where diplomacy has failed to aid the maimed and battered Syrians pleading for rescue and haven from the death that inexorably stalks them, while their president congratulates himself on having achieved his goal; the destruction of opposition to his capriciously deadly rule.
                     

Karam Almasri: The main entrance to a surgical hospital in eastern Aleppo after it was hit by bombardments: MSF