Aleppo: On the edge of Aleppo’s ancient citadel, Zahra and her family squatted in a once-grand apartment, now facing rebel lines. Plastic sheets covered its tall windows to shield the space from a sniper’s view; shelling boomed in the distance.
Zahra, 25, who gave just one name, flicked between two photos on her phone. The first showed her husband, a Syrian army soldier and the father of her unborn child. “Seven months,” she said, touching her belly.
In the second, her husband was splayed on the ground, blood trickling from his nose. Two other fallen soldiers lay beside him. He died two weeks ago.
“May the men who did this also die,” she said with quiet determination.
Four years of war have hardened hearts in Aleppo, a divided city and, for the past week, the scene of merciless fighting.
Over the past week, a fragile truce, brokered by the United States and Russia, has crumbled in Syria, leading to the worst violence in months. Russian fighter jets roar through the sky, pounding targets in rebel-held areas. The rebels send barrages of mortars and homemade missiles that land in crowded neighbourhoods. The war has stoked sectarian tensions and become a proxy battle for regional and global interests.
Most casualties are civilians – at least 202 in the past week, about two-thirds in rebel-controlled eastern areas and the remainder in the government-held west side, according to groups that monitor casualties. The violence shows a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives,” the United Nations’ human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussain, said on Friday.
One of the world’s oldest inhabited cities, Aleppo has for centuries been known as the crossroads of empires, with Ottoman, Armenian, Jewish and French influences. Today the only way in, on the government side, is via a lonely road that cuts through hostile territory: a bumpy tarmac strip lined with deserted villages and isolated government outposts.
I was travelling with my translator and a Syrian government minder. Traffic moved at a brisk pace: Syrian rebels held territory to the east of the road, and Daesh terrorists held it to the west.
Our first sight of Aleppo was its ravaged southern neighbourhoods – a vista of devastation that has become a familiar image of Syria’s multi-year conflict.
Like many war zones, other parts bustled with a semblance of normality. Traffic officers directed vehicles, laughing children poured out of schools, and shoppers bustled through stores that sold food and artisanal perfumes. People seemed strangely immune to the background beat of explosions – thuds, crashes and bangs – that provide a deadly metronome to their daily existence.
That phlegmatic attitude, though, is little more than a form of war-weary roulette. Whistling death, in the form of mortars and rockets, can fall from the sky in any corner of the city at any time. During our first dinner, in an upmarket restaurant, we were jolted by the whoosh of a departing rocket, its engine thrumming for seconds before it launched, apparently from a nearby park.
The old city’s sprawling medieval souk, considered one of the Arab world’s finest – and a Unesco World Heritage site – is now a wasteland. Down a deserted street, a woman in fatigues sat in a bunker, boasting of how she once cared for tigers for a living at the Aleppo zoo. The woman, who goes by a nomme de guerre, Rose Abu Jaffer, produced photos of herself being nuzzled by a lion, holding a python around her neck, standing beside a bear and allowing a tiger cub to press two paws against her head.
“That’s Sweetie,” she said, pointing to the cub. “My baby.”
Her nine-year career as a zookeeper was cut short when the rebels occupied the zoo four years ago, prompting her to join the fight, she said. Now she is a frontline fighter.
The nearest rebel position was about 100 feet away, she said – quiet for now, but unlikely to last. “They only dare come out at night,” she said. “They are like bats, cowardly bats.”
A shell crashed into a nearby building with a deafening bang. A vehicle careened down the street, driven by another soldier. Abu Jaffer did not flinch, but advised my translator and me to move on.
Although Syria’s revolt started as a protest against the authoritarian rule of President Bashar Al Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 46 years, it has stirred sectarian tensions and century-old historical grievances. Most of the city’s Armenian population, known for its goldsmiths, has fled to Europe or Canada. Many of those who remain are staunch supporters of Al Assad, whom they see as their only hope against Islamist fighters who would never let them live in peace.
Father Iskander Assad, a Greek Orthodox priest, lives in Maidan, a frontline neighbourhood that is now half-deserted. A day earlier, a mortar slammed into his home, punching a hole in the roof. His wife had been crying all night, he said, but he was not interested in sympathy.
“Sorry is no good,” he said. “We need a solution. Sorry solves nothing.”
Iskander Assad led the way up five flights of stairs to his top-floor apartment. “The truce was a mistake,” he said, referring to the crumbling ceasefire, as he surveyed a room strewn with dust and broken masonry.
“What have we gotten out of it?” he asked. “The terrorists have now come in bigger groups, with more sophisticated weapons. These people are mercenaries. It gave them time to regroup. And now it is we who are suffering – not them.”
Neither side has a monopoly on suffering, or blame, in Syria’s grinding war.
Bashar Al Assad, the president, faced new accusations of war crimes after air strikes hit Al Quds hospital, on the rebel side of Aleppo, on Wednesday night. By Friday, rescuers said they had pulled 55 bodies from the rubble, including 29 children and women, some of whom had been in labour, according to one aid group. Doctors Without Borders, which had been supporting the hospital, denounced the bombing as “outrageous.”
Residents in government-controlled areas have learned to fear the ‘hell cannon’ – an improvised form of rockets fashioned from modified propane gas cylinders and packed with explosives and metal objects that are used by some insurgent groups, including those that receive US assistance.
Both sides have been ravaged by bombardments, although only the government has fighter jets and helicopters at its disposal, which have reduced broad swaths of rebel territory to rubble.
Disregard for civilian life is universal. On Thursday, after the hospital attack, rebel rockets rained on virtually every district of government-controlled Aleppo in a fierce barrage that claimed dozens of casualties. Taxis and ambulances screeched to a halt outside the city’s Al Razi hospital as desperate relatives rushed bloodied and dust-covered people, many of them children, into the emergency ward.
No one is quite sure how many of Aleppo’s pre-war population of more than 2 million people is left. Many have already fled to Europe, Lebanon or other parts of Syria. Those who remain scrape by on makeshift systems for water, electricity and water. Any escalation in fighting brings the potential for a “humanitarian disaster,” warned Valter Gros, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross in Aleppo.
“It’s very heavy these days,” he said. “Everyone feels it in different ways.”
Gros, who is originally from Bosnia, said he could relate to the apparently calm demeanour of Aleppo residents in the streets.
“It’s bizarre to hear mortars in the distance when there are kids playing basketball outside the window of my office,” he said. “But people try to be normal, to be alive. When your coping mechanism is swamped, it makes you insensitive to things that people in the West would look on with horror. They get used to it – and that’s the scary thing.”
Our interview ended when a mortar crashed into a nearby street, rattling the windows of Gros’ office. He moved us and his staff members into a safe area in the centre of the building – the old Turkish Consulate – where we waited for 10 minutes. But as soon as we ventured out, another explosion rang out.
Some residents are determined to press on with life. Hours later, about 100 young men gathered at a restaurant for a raucous wedding party. The evening sun streamed through the glass walls as the partygoers, many dressed in lounge suits, ate from fruit platters, smoked water pipes and danced the dabke, a traditional folk dance – unable to hear, over the music, the occasional boom of explosions outside.
“There is war, and then there is life,” said Omar Hretani, 21, a business student and the best man. “We have two hearts in this country – one for sorrow and one for happiness. Everything has its own story.”
The restaurant is called Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting dolls, in a nod to the city’s long trading ties with Russia. After four years of war, Aleppans had learned to get on with life, said the manager, Nadim Bsata, 27, who had himself become engaged the night earlier.
An hour later, though, there was a reminder of the perils of Al Assad’s hardfisted rule. A squad of black-clad military intelligence men pulled up outside the restaurant, grabbed Bsata by the shirt and remonstrated with him for allowing his customers to sing and dance on a day that had brought so much violence.
The conversation moved to a table on the terrace, where Bsata assured the commanding officer that he fully supported the soldiers. “I don’t want to let terrorists destroy the city,” he said. “You must kill them and let us live.”
Apparently satisfied with the answer, the commanding officer kissed Bsata on both cheeks and left. Upstairs, the wedding party resumed and continued into the night – even as bombs continued to drop into the streets, some quite near Matryoskha.
