KOBANI, Syria — The blood moon rose over a scene of bombed-out buildings reduced to boulder-size rubble, with newly printed street signs noting the names of people who had died here in this little Syrian city of Kobani.

Soon dusk would draw its cloak over the sad tableau, in a neighborhood now called The Museum. For a few minutes between the setting of the wintry sun and the rising of the fattened moon, that twilit orange was the only illumination.

There are many devastated urban landscapes in Syria — Raqqa and Aleppo, for instance. Other countries’ civil wars have shorn cities of their downtowns with a similarly breathtaking savagery — Beirut in the 1980s; Sarajevo in the ’90s; Mogadishu in the new millennium.

But the half-square-mile of the old front-line area and business district of Kobani, population 40,000, is as bad as it gets anywhere, perhaps more shocking because the place is so small. Its moment of siege and destruction by the Islamic State from September 2014 to January 2015 is already forgotten abroad, as the Syrian war lumbers on elsewhere.