Epicenter of rebellion facing collapse under brutal attacks
BEIRUT — The Aleppo that Ibrahim al-Haj’s son Laith was born into 10 months ago is now being destroyed.
The opposition-held districts of the Syrian city have been surrounded and under siege for months. Russian and Syrian warplanes are bombing the streets into rubble and government forces are chipping away at the pocket of opposition control. For the 270,000 people holding out there, everything is getting harder to find — food, drinkable water and fuel. Residents are planting vegetables in bomb craters and digging wells.
Al-Haj and his wife increasingly argue over what to do for Laith’s future. And there’s a more immediate issue: What to feed him. His mother is weaning him off breast milk, but there’s little else to give him. So he eats what his parents do. Grains, thyme and cracked wheat.
“It’s better than him not growing,” al-Haj said. Potatoes, the little boy’s favorite, are a distant dream. “The hardest thing about the siege is when your son asks you for something and you can’t get it for him.”
Families like al-Haj’s across Aleppo’s opposition-held eastern districts are wrestling with how to get by day to day. They’re also weighed down with the fear that all their dreams for the crown jewel of the opposition’s territory are on the verge of collapse.
Ever since it joined the uprising four years ago, eastern Aleppo tried to make itself a model for a Syria without President Bashar Assad. It elected local leaders, ran its own education system and built an economy trading with the rebel-held countryside and neighboring Turkey. Its residents were able to keep life going amid four years of ferocious fighting with the pro-government western districts.
Now all that is breaking down. The local council and rebels had prepared for siege, stockpiling food and fuel. But their plans risk being overwhelmed under the pounding of missiles and bunker-busting bombs in the most relentless assault Aleppo has ever seen.
Everyone is dealing with tragedy even while finding ways to get by.
When a strike killed his best friend, Ahmed Farawati started a garden of greens and vegetables in the rubble of his friend’s home.
“Every day I water the plants and I remember my friend, who was like a brother,” the 21-year-old Farawati said. “The plants will also be useful in this siege.”
The balance of power changed when Russian warplanes joined the fight in late 2015. Backed by air strikes, government forces advanced until they cut off all access to eastern Aleppo in July, sealing off a pocket about eight miles long and three miles wide.
In late September, government forces began their assault to crush that enclave after the collapse of a Russia-U.S.-brokered cease-fire. Hundreds have been killed since.