The situation in Aleppo hasn’t always been this grim. At their last census twelve years ago, one of the oldest continuously populated cities in the world and the former third largest city in the Ottoman Empire had over 2 million people living in it. It was almost exactly six years ago now that the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor sparked a wave of protests which quickly swept across the Middle East and Northern Africa like wildfire. The early days of the Arab Spring signaled the potential for real change, bringing hope to countless people tired of living under oppressive authoritarian regimes such as Syria’s. While the movement ended up falling short of revolutionary, it succeeded in upsetting the status quo to varying degrees in different countries — unfortunately this has often meant violent conflict.

Protests in Syria began in 2011 and initially centered around demands for democratic reforms, the release of political prisoners, and the suspension of emergency law. However, government forces were quick to fire on peaceful protestors — a trend which led protesting citizens to gradually shift the focus of their demands from reforms to the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. By May of 2011, barely two months after protests began, the Syrian government had killed over 1,000 civilians. Within the next month an organized, armed resistance emerged with some soldiers and generals defecting to side with the rebels.

Rather than concede power as the presidents of Egypt, Tunisia, and other leaders of countries involved in the Arab Spring chose to (with mixed results), Assad has since attempted to tighten his grip on the nation he inherited from his father. By releasing and arming convicted Jihadists from Syria’s jails, he made an early effort to taint the anti-government forces with an extremist element — likely to make it difficult for the U.S. or other international actors to back rebel groups. This strategy, along with attempts by the Islamic State to take advantage of the civil war and capture territory have provided Assad the opportunity to frame the war as “fighting terrorism”, a goal which is obviously extraneous to his deeper desire to maintain power. With the military support of Russia (who have their own reasons for wanting to project geopolitical power in the region) this has been made somewhat possible.

The civil war in Syria has cost approximately 470,000 lives, displaced over 7.6 million people internally, and left over 4.8 million refugees — so far. To Assad, this is all the cost of preserving sovereignty, or as German sociologist Max Weber put it “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. Whether this is possible in the long run remains dubious as Syria is simply no longer the state that it was six years ago and had been since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. While Russia may have ultimately helped take back Aleppo by any means necessary, the country as a whole still remains splintered into numerous territories with some controlled by the government and rest in the hands of rebels, ISIS, and the recently formed Syrian Democratic Forces.

That is to say, the war is far from over. Meanwhile, medical infrastructure in Aleppo is long gone, with the last hospitals having been bombed as activists on the ground and human rights groups decry the inhumane tactics being employed by government forces. Rebels are now cornered in their remaining strongholds in the Eastern half of the city, where anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 civilians could also remain trapped. The white helmets have are unable to give a body count as a result of the carnage, while UNICEF said it has received reports of unaccompanied children trapped in a building taking fire, and one U.N. official described the scene as “a complete meltdown of humanity.” A tenuous ceasefire seemed to be taking effect early Wednesday to allow for the evacuation of civilians and the injured, however government shelling soon resumed before progress could be made. The only certainties as of now are that the Syrian government is close to regaining complete control of Aleppo, and that the result will inevitably be heavy casualties.

Watching and reading the final messages posted on social media by people still in Eastern Aleppo is a haunting experience, reminiscent of the observation made by Australian philosopher Peter Singer that “Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation.” As I drove to the post office yesterday to ship brightly packaged, neatly wrapped sets of Pokemon cards, books, and a nail-polish kit to my cousins in Minnesota to open Christmas morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what cruel twist of fate afforded our family such security and excess while seemingly taking direct aim at others, inflicting them with crippling poverty and unrelenting tragedy.

I was reminded of a thought experiment — the veil of ignorance. American philosopher John Rawls proposed that we ought to imagine ourselves as existing behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding the circumstances of our life, then imagine the sort of world we want to live in. This type of thinking invariably tends to elicit an individual’s most egalitarian ideas about the world, while encouraging them to adopt an empathetic paradigm towards all of humanity. It also touches on a fundamentally sobering reality, the fact that those of us who live comfortable, safe, happy lives do so only at the mercy of a universe which arbitrarily decided where and when we would be born.

In other words, I am no more or less human than Monther Etaky, the Syrian man who woke up Tuesday to find he was still alive and the city he calls home was still being bombed. I deserve no more security than Abdul Kafi Alhamad, an English teacher who said it was like “doomsday” as government forces advanced. I am no more deserving of an education than Bana Alabed, the seven-year-old girl who has been tweeting updates such as “Final message. People are dying since last night. I am very surprised I am tweeting right now and still alive.” and later “My dad is injured now. I am crying.” We may have all been dealt different hands, none of them deserved, but nothing can change the common denominator we all share in this world— our humanity.