Photos show Aleppo before and after the battle raged on its streets – and as it tries to rebuild

The battle for Aleppo raged for over five years, coming to an end in December 2016 and marking a major milestone in a bloody civil war that has transformed Syria from a bustling country to a devastating warzone.

The war, which was born out of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, left 6.1 million internally displaced and left 5.6 million people as refugees out of Syria as of April, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Death tolls from the conflict are hard to calculate, but in 2016 the Syrian Center for Policy Research estimated that 470,000 people had been killed.

The city was left a shell of its former self after the bloody war between rebels and government forces. While the Syrian civil war continues, looking at photos of the city of Aleppo before and after the battle took place on its streets serves as a sobering reminder of the catastrophic consequences of the conflict.

This is Aleppo in December 2016, when the battle in the city was declared over. For the previous five years, the Syrian city was the target for conflict and intense shelling from Russian-backed government forces and rebels fighting against President Assad's regime. Airstrikes left ancient mosques and homes under blankets of dust and rubble.

Hundreds of thousands of people were trapped in the besieged city. Hospitals and schools were destroyed.

But life in Aleppo wasn't always this way. The city had spent centuries evolving into the country's largest industrial and commercial hub and is one of the oldest inhabited cities in human history. It was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1986.