CAIRO _ Monther Etaky's wife was breast-feeding, and in desperate need of nutrition. He spent five days hunting for yogurt to give her _ anything to keep her and their 2-month-old son alive _ then gave up.
The streets outside their apartment were a 24-hour-a-day death zone of exploding bombs and whistling mortars.
"Warplanes with machine guns fly all the day, all the night, shooting just to say to people, 'We are here, you can't sleep because we are exploding all the day around you, you can't move, any small light we can target,'" said Etaky, a graphic designer and photographer from Aleppo _ a city that has become the dark emblem of Syria's more than 5-year-old civil war.
"I just watch him all the night and try to calm him," he said of his son.
Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth, an architectural treasure settled in the Bronze Age that endured the rule of Hittites and Romans, Mongols and Ottomans.
Once Syria's most populous city, it is still home to about 1.5 million people in the west and 250,000 in the east.
But residents tell of water pipes gone dry, hospitals without blood-pressure medication, underfed schoolchildren too hungry to focus on their lessons. Schools and hospitals have moved into basements in hopes of escaping the shelling.
"We live in a state of terror all the time," said Mohammed Abu Jihad, of eastern Aleppo. "Even when we sleep."
The battle for the city pits Islamic extremists and anti-government rebels, entrenched in eastern Aleppo, against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian allies in the western part of the city.
U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry has called for a war crimes investigation into the bombing campaign, and last Friday the United Nation's human rights chief, Zeid Raad Hussein, said Aleppo has become "a slaughterhouse." He told the U.N.'s Human Rights Council that attacks on eastern Aleppo "constitute crimes of historic proportions."
Russia recently announced a pause in airstrikes on rebel-controlled parts of Aleppo, and last Friday the Syrian government opened a corridor for those wanting to leave the city. But fighting has been halted before. A cease-fire was declared in September. It lasted about a week.
What has it been like to live through a siege that has captured the world's horrified attention? By telephone, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Skype, several of them told their stories. The first is Etaky.
