Friar: a sense of hope is growing in Aleppo

A Franciscan friar who visited the Syrian city of Aleppo last week has said that the devastation there is beyond what people can imagine.

Fr John Luke Gregory, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Rhodes in Greece, said it was “like a whole suburb of London completely flattened. You can’t imagine the devastation. It’s not just streets – it’s whole areas bombed out.”

Despite that, he said, there was a sense of hope now that the heavy shelling had stopped: “The road sweepers are at work again. There are all these bombed buildings but they are cleaning the streets of litter.”