Inside Aleppo, the city Assad left to rot as a lesson in the price of rising up
Bashar al-Assad’s face has been ripped away from posters at the abandoned checkpoint that separates Sheikh Maqsoud, a neighbourhood in the north of Aleppo, from the rest of the city. No cars dare use the wide boulevard any more because the road is still watched by Kurdish snipers allied to the regime. The units retreated into the warren of bombed and burnt-out buildings when Islamist rebel groups launched an unprecedented attack on the city at the end of November, triggering a chain reaction that led to the swift collapse of the Assad dynasty.
Civilians hurry past, some with small children in pushchairs, others rolling cooking gas canisters down the road, all trying not to attract undue attention. A man had been shot and killed here the night before, picked off from the upper floor of a windowless apartment block. Aleppo fell to an umbrella of Sunni Arab factions led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) three weeks ago, but the Kurdish units stationed in Sheikh Maqsoud refused to surrender when HTS came in, afraid of what would happen if they surrendered. Now, they appear to be waiting for something to shift in Syria’s new and fragile status quo.
“It’s OK for us to go in but no one else, it would be dangerous,” said Abu Hassan, 46, a resident of the Kurdish-majority neighbourhood, returning home from the old city. “We are back to living in uncertain times.”
Aleppo, a cosmopolitan and ancient merchant city on the silk road between the Mediterranean port of Antioch, now Antakya in Turkey, and the great Euphrates, which flows to the Persian Gulf, has survived calamity and catastrophe in its 8,000-year history: earthquakes, plagues and millennia of wars between Arab, Turkic, Persian and Christian kingdoms.
But a decade on from the Guardian’s last visit, during the four-year-long battle for Aleppo between the Assad regime and rebel forces, it is clear that Syria’s vicious civil war has ripped it apart, tearing at the social fabric and wreaking physical destruction that cannot easily be mended. At least 30,000 people were killed here, hundreds of thousands more lives ruined, and centuries’ worth of priceless human heritage has been destroyed for ever. [Continue reading…]