The New York Times reports: A video taken by a drone winding its way through the battered city of Homs, Syria, has captured haunting images of the virtually complete destruction after five years of civil war.

The minute-and-a-half video was uploaded on Tuesday to a YouTube channel operated by Alexander Pushin, a cameraman who runs a drone filming company, Russia Works, and who has taken several videos of Syria’s war-torn landscape.

In his latest video, whose date of origin was unclear, the camera travels at low altitude between buildings and alleyways in Homs, a central city that had been home to a prewar population of one million people. It is almost completely empty of life.

The images evoke scenes from a post-apocalyptic video game — an abandoned graveyard, a lone motorcyclist, gutted buildings reduced to pile after pile of rubble — and help explain the desperation driving the country’s spasms of civilian flight. [Continue reading…]

In his YouTube description of the footage, camera operator Alexander Pushin claims the area was destroyed by “radical Islamists and foreign mercenaries,” but Tom Gara offers a more realistic assessment of the kind of fire power that can produce this level of destruction.

The devastation of Homs. Jihadists and rebels can't do this. It takes an army, an airforce, a government. https://t.co/OBqchWxFCt

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) February 3, 2016