Reportaje The New York Times, 30.04.2016 Declan Walsh
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 has hardened hearts in Aleppo, a divided city and, for the past week, the scene of merciless fighting.
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 mortar rounds and homemade missiles that land in crowded neighborhoods. The war has stoked sectarian tensions and become a proxy battle for regional and global interests.
Most fatalities 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-Hussein, said 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 traveling 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 Islamic State militants held it to the west.
A medic at Al Razi hospital in Aleppo on Thursday, after rebel attacks killed dozens. Credit D. Walsh (NYT)
Our first sight of Aleppo was its ravaged southern neighborhoods — a vista of devastation that has become a familiar image of Syria’s multiyear conflict.
Like many war zones, other parts bustled with a semblance of normalcy. Traffic officers directed vehicles, laughing children poured out of schools, and shoppers crowded in 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 mortar rounds 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 nom 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 careered down the street, driven by another soldier. Ms. Jaffer did not flinch, but advised my translator and me to move on.
Although Syria’s revolt started as a protest against the authoritarian government 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 Mr. Assad, whom they see as their only hope against Islamist fighters who would never let them live in peace.
The Rev. Iskander Assad, a Greek Orthodox priest, lives in Maidan, a frontline neighborhood that is now half-deserted. A day earlier, a mortar round 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.”
Father 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 cease-fire, 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.
Mr. Assad, the president, faced new accusations of war crimes afterairstrikes 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 labor, 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 rocket fashioned from modified propane gas cylinders and packed with explosives and metal objects that is used by some insurgent groups, including those that receive American 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.
The next day, government forces hit three medical facilities in the east of the city.
Some residents on the government side accuse the United States and its allies of selective outrage, turning a blind eye to the excesses of allies, like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“The Security Council has double standards,” said the Rev. Ibrahim Nsier, a Presbyterian pastor. “They don’t see our victims. They ask for democracy in Syria, and they don’t see dictatorship in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”
No one is quite sure how many of Aleppo’s prewar population of over two million people are left. Many have already fled to Europe, Lebanon or other parts of Syria. Those who remain scrape by on makeshift systems for 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.”
Mr. Gros, who is originally from Bosnia, said he could relate to the apparently calm demeanor of Aleppans 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 round crashed into a nearby street, rattling the windows of Mr. Gros’s office. He moved us and his staff members into a safe area in the center 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 Aleppans 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 before.
An hour later, though, there was a reminder of the perils of Mr. Assad’s hardfisted rule. A squad of black-clad military intelligence men pulled up outside the restaurant, grabbed Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
