The Washington Post reports: The shaky cellphone video shows Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, a Syrian English teacher, crouching behind a stone wall, the hood of a yellow Adidas sweatshirt pulled over his dark hair. Rain beats down in the background as he speaks into the camera.

Al-Hamdo says he has spent the night in eastern Aleppo fleeing from Syrian government forces, who had all but completed their brutal siege of the city’s last rebel-held neighborhoods on Tuesday.

President Bashar al-Assad’s troops are closing in, al-Hamdo says, fighting back tears, “maybe 300 meters away.”

“No place now to go. It’s the last place,” he says in the video, posted to Twitter just before midnight Monday. “I don’t know really what to say. Words can’t go out now. I hope you can do something to stop the expected massacres.”

He continues: “No one slept this night. I just slept for an hour. My wife, my daughter, all the people who I know, they’re . . .”

The audio cuts out first. Then the video ends.

As Syrian forces stormed the last sliver of the city controlled by the opposition, Syrians such as al-Hamdo posted desperate messages to social media, some of them saying they believed they would be captured or killed by government troops. [Continue reading…]