May 12, 2016 7:13 AM

Aleppo: It's not about who's right or wrong; it's about who's left

Aleppo, like so many of history’s greatest cities, has been shaped — cursed and blessed — by existing where peoples and cultures, commerce and landscapes, clash and intersect. Few would-be conquerors if the Levant bypassed it. The Crusaders tried, but never breached its walls. The Byzantines and Mongols did. Fighting in an alliance with Frankish knights, the Mongols slaughtered many of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants when they captured the city in 1260. When Tamurlane sacked the place 140 years later, he built a tower with the skulls of 20,000 Aleppines. It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable that Syria’s civil war would come with such fury to Aleppo. Its geography and history make it all but impossible for the city to avoid for long such violence swirling around it…. “Aleppo has become the real epicentre of this struggle,” says Joshua Landis, director for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “And it’s likely to remain an open sore.”

I’ve had the great good fortune to have had the opportunity to travel to some pretty amazing places in my life. Few of them have impacted me as much as Aleppo, Syria. I can remember, as if it was yesterday, stepping out of my $5/night hotel (cockroaches gratis) into an Aleppo morning and encountering something unlike anything I’d previously experienced. I closed my eyes…and realized that nothing I smelled, heard, or sensed was even remotely familiar. It was a humbling experience for a small-town Minnesota boy just out of college, but I reveled in the history, the smells, the language, the sounds, and the food I found in Aleppo. It was a life-altering experience, being as it was in the midst of my first international experience.

I loved Aleppo. I walked miles on the city’s streets, walked up the hill to explore the citadel, perused its souk, and ate everything I could get my hands on. I left thinking about how much I’d love to return someday- a day I now fear may never come. Syria’s now five-year-long civil war has torn Aleppo asunder. The streets I once walked so blissfully along have in most cases been reduced to rubble, a virtually uninhabitable moonscape reminiscent of Sarajevo in the early ’90s. A city I experienced as beautiful, captivating, and a source of endless fascination is now home to unimaginable suffering, cruelty, bloodshed, and privation.

The agonies now afflicting it seem uniquely cruel, even by the perverted standards of this long-running civil war. Six hospitals have been bombed or shelled in the past two weeks, killing doctors and children. Neighbourhoods are in ruins. Residents lack water and electricity. Aid agencies warn of a humanitarian disaster.

The city is divided between forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and rebel groups, including al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaida affiliate. Kurdish forces control some neighbourhoods, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant lurks to the northeast.

Recent attempts to negotiate a ceasefire between the Syrian government and some rebel groups have floundered in Aleppo. In the eyes of all the civil war’s belligerents, says Landis, it is simply too valuable.

And so the destruction and senseless bloodshed continue unabated. Whichever party ultimately “wins” Aleppo will claim a city existing in name only. Even if the war was to end today, it will take years, perhaps generations, before the city is restored to anything even remotely resembling what its former glory.

I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I will almost certainly never see Aleppo again. Once the war made it’s way there, the city I fell in love with was quickly and ruthlessly destroyed by those who cared nothing for the city nor its people. Never a place blessed with great wealth and fortune under the best of circumstances, Aleppo is now nothing but a tragic humanitarian disaster, a place destined to remain dangerously unstable for years to come.

The Aleppo I loved is no more, and I fear for what will rise to replace the city I will likely never see again.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on May 12, 2016 7:13 AM.

North Carolina: The "We've Got Our Potties...er, Priorities...Straight" State was the previous entry in this blog.

Nope...not bat$#!& crazy at all.... is the next entry in this blog.

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