The chess term ‛stalemate’ is a fitting description for the civil war that has been waged for three years in Syria. Nobody can win the war, but nobody is willing to make peace. The war has become just numbers: over 130.000 dead and seven million refugees in Syria and beyond, in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. The Syrian war has not become a media war, because it has been too dangerous to document. Only a few reporters and photographers have dared venture to Aleppo, the heart of darkness. Niklas Meltio from Helsinki is one of them. He does photo reportages of the war in Syria. They show the true faces of the war. They are not dissimilar to war itself: raw, grotesque, and full of tears and pain. This award-winning film follows Niklas Meltio to the ruins of the great Umayyad Mosque in the old city area of Aleppo, and to the Syrian refugee camps of northern Syria and northern Iraq.