Saah

From the ground the city looks calm and orderly: just another quaint Middle Eastern town crowded with domes and arches and tall minarets looming over courtyards and quiet alley streets. There are striped sheets draped between the buildings - perhaps laundry, drying on a line. We think: "this could be anywhere!" But then we rise above the city, carried by doves soaring across the sky, and that is when we begin to understand. It is through the dove's eyes that we first see the truth: this is no picturesque Middle Eastern village; it is a war-wracked, colorless city of crushed homes and hollowed buildings.

The city is unnamed, but we've seen many like it on our TV screens. We recognize the bombed-out buildings, the streets strewn with rubble, the black smoke swirling up to the horizon. The striped sheets draped between the buildings, we now notice, are pockmarked and torn, riddled with bullet holes. This is not laundry. It is protection. The sheets act as veils obscuring the line of sight of the government snipers perched above the city, their scopes focused squarely on the moving figures below.

And that is where the story of Saah comes into focus: with the bored sharpshooter standing atop a water tower, looking for someone to shoot, settling on the dove soaring above his head. - Reza Aslan