The Russians have stopped playing nice. They're bombing Aleppo back to the stone ages...

Images via The Institute for the Study of War, story from Business Insider via Yahoo...

On Sunday, Russian airstrikes over a busy marketplace in the rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria, killed at least 70 civilians and wounded dozens more.
“We’ve never been bombed like this," Issa Khaled, a resident of the Aleppo suburb of Ghouta, told The Guardian the day after the attack.
"The skies above us looked like Hiroshima," he said, referring to the Japanese city targeted by an atomic bomb during World War II. "There were clouds like mushrooms everywhere we looked. The destruction was incredible."
In retaliation for Turkey's decision to down a Russian warplane late last month, Moscow has stepped up its bombing raids across the north, near the Turkish-Syrian border.
The raids, targeting rebel supply lines and civilian infrastructure, have created "an emerging humanitarian crisis" and exacerbated a refugee crisis that already has Europe near its breaking point.
“We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of civilian casualties. More and more people are being hurt because the intensity of bombing is greater,” Rae McGrath, country director for Turkey and North Syria for the American aid agency Mercy Corps, told The Washington Post's Liz Sly.
McGrath added: “It’s hard to imagine that the conditions in Syria could have become worse than they already were, but they have.”

This is brutal.

This appears to be unrelenting.

This is the Russia that the old skool Marines talk about.

The rebels will sue for peace and they'll soon be Iraq's problem..not Syria's.   Russian airpower is doing what the combined forces of NATO's air arms couldn't. Its really amazing how quickly you can end a conflict if you decide that you're in it to win it....rules of engagement are loosened and your theory of war is to end it quickly instead of taking two decades because a short, sharp campaign in the end saves lives.