Between the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood in northern Aleppo and the rest of the city there is an abandoned checkpoint. The image of Bashar Al Assad’s face has been torn from the posters and no car dares to pass through the wide boulevard, because the road is still guarded by Kurdish snipers allied to the regime. His units retreated to the maze of burned and bombed buildings when Islamist insurgent groups launched their unprecedented attack on Aleppo in late November, setting off a chain reaction that quickly led to the collapse of the Assad dynasty.
Civilians pass by quickly. Some carry small children in strollers. Others, gas cylinders for cooking. Everyone tries not to attract attention. A man was shot dead the night before in a windowless apartment block. Although Aleppo fell three weeks ago under the control of a group made up of Sunni Arab factions and led by the Levant Liberation Organization (HTS, for its acronym in Arabic), the Kurdish units stationed in Sheikh Maqsoud have not wanted to surrender for fear of what can happen if they do. Now, they seem to be waiting for something to change in the fragile new status quo from Syria.
“We have no problem entering, but no one else, it would be dangerous,” says Abu Hassan, 46, a resident of this neighborhood where a majority of the population is Kurdish, upon his return from the old city. “We are once again living times of uncertainty.”
Besieged and destroyed
Aleppo, a cosmopolitan city and an ancient trading point on the Silk Road, located between the Mediterranean port of Antioch (in modern Turkey) and the great Euphrates, which flows into the Persian Gulf, has survived calamities and catastrophes in its 8,000 years of history: earthquakes, plagues and millennia of wars between Arab, Turkish, Persian and Christian kingdoms.
But a decade after the last visit of Guardianand after a bloody civil war that has destroyed Syria, it is clear that the four years of battle between the regime and insurgent forces for control of Aleppo have destroyed the social fabric and generated physical destruction that is difficult to repair. At least 30,000 people have died here, hundreds of thousands of lives have been ruined, and centuries of priceless heritage have been destroyed forever.
“I can’t believe he’s back,” says Khaled Khatib, 29, a member of the group known as the White Helmets, which spent the war rescuing people trapped by Syrian and Russian bombing in opposition-held areas. He left Aleppo in 2016, certain he would never be able to return home.
In the summer of 2012, after Assad harshly repressed peaceful Arab Spring protests and the opposition responded with an armed insurrection, factions of the Free Syrian Army took control of the eastern half of Aleppo, the most populous city. and the economic heart of the country.
Aleppo quickly became one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Jihadist groups infiltrated what had begun as a nationalist uprising, turning it into an ideological battle with gigantic repercussions within and beyond Syrian borders. Vladimir Putin’s intervention to support Al Assad in 2015 turned the tables, adding Russian air power to the barrel bombs that the regime launched against the hospitals in the eastern half and against the workers of the White Helmets.
When government forces cut off the last supply line from eastern Aleppo in the summer of 2016, the siege tightened and the regime recaptured the city block by block, forcing the last remaining civilians and fighters to flee to rural areas in hands of the opposition at the end of the year. Assad’s recapture of the city, the last major urban center outside his control, was considered the death knell for the dreams of the Arab Spring.
Entire neighborhoods in the east and south of the city remain reduced to rubble today and their neighbors are long gone. The destruction has been a silent reminder of the price to pay for opposing the regime. Under piles of steel and concrete structures are bodies that were never recovered. Only a handful of apartments remain undamaged, and the clothes hanging along with the plants on the balconies are the only flashes of color amid the gray.
The streets surrounding Aleppo’s 13th-century citadel and the once-thriving commercial center in the west are less damaged, but they remain silent. It is clear that many shops have been closed for years, and pollution from the local refined diesel that supplies many homes and cars has left the streets greasy and blackened. After suffering oppression from the regime and the Islamist dictates of some insurgent groups, almost none of the women she interviewed Guardian He didn’t want to speak or give his name.
But now, with the departure of Al Assad, hope is reborn to build a new Syria on the ruins of the battlefield. The three red stars and the green stripe of the opposition flag are everywhere: on the facades of schools, in all the shop windows and on the hoods of cars.
Food and fuel prices soared in Aleppo immediately after the insurgent offensive in late November. But they have been stabilizing with the arrival of goods and products from Türkiye and from the HTS stronghold in Idlib. Now, the sweet aroma of clementines for sale floats over the smell of waste.
Bashar Hakami is 28 years old and sells apples, winter citrus and the last pomegranates of the year. “Prices are much better and there is no longer rationing of bread or fuel,” he says. “You can do whatever you want.”
Aleppo was the first target in the surprise offensive led by the HTS, which in late 2018 wrested control of the nearby Idlib province and surrounding countryside from other factions. With the rest of the world tacitly accepting Assad’s victory in the war, the HTS spent years planning the counteroffensive, trying to get the regime’s weakened forces and its demoralized recruits to underestimate its intentions. They understood that their time had come when they saw Assad’s partners (Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia) get bogged down in their wars with Ukraine and Israel. Less than two weeks later, Assad fled the country and the opposition flag was raised over Damascus, the capital. Surprised, the Syrian Government troops were quickly overwhelmed; some units fled and hastily assembled reinforcements were unable to coordinate the defense.
At the Basel roundabout, on the western outskirts of Aleppo, a bombing killed at least 15 civilians. It is still possible to see the steps stained with blood and diesel under what was formerly a statue of Al Assad’s brother.
Some civilians fled and others took to the streets to celebrate, tearing down statues of Assad and his relatives, tearing down the regime’s ubiquitous flags, and painting graffiti over the countless images of Bashar and Hafez, his father, who became president. in 1970 and died in 2000. Practically, overnight, the more than 50 years of the police state established by the Al Asad family had come to an end. and the more than 13 years of civil war.
“I have a residence permit in the United States and I could have left whenever I wanted,” says Joseph Fanoun, 68, owner of an antiques store in the Christian neighborhood of Azaziyeh. “I didn’t do it because I love my home and my city and I knew that one day we would be free.” Both Fanoun and the Santa Claus figures in front of his door wear scarves in the colors of the Syrian opposition.
Not everyone is so happy. Mahmous Farash, 50, owner of a breakfast restaurant, left Aleppo in 2013. He fled with his family to Cairo for fear that the uprising against Assad would transform into a nightmare of sectarianism, financed by foreign powers. with his own interests. “I came back six months ago and now I’m not sure it was the right decision,” he explains, looking nervously at three Islamist fighters who, on this bright and frosty morning, are eating fatteh and ful (beans and fried bread with yogurt and chickpeas) on the premises. One of them tells a woman, repeatedly, to cover her hair.
At the Karm al-Jabal fire station, members of the White Helmets clean and repair rescue vehicles and fire trucks that the regime had left rusting. Several of them worked as firefighters before the war and now find themselves again in circumstances difficult to imagine just a few weeks ago. “There is a lot of work to be done,” says Khatib, the youngest of them. “I feel that Aleppo is an open wound, but we cannot waste this opportunity.”
Translation by Francisco de Zárate.
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