ANCIENT CITY, TIME-WORN STRUGGLE: HOW THE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF ALEPPO COMBINE TO MAKE THE CITY THE ONGOING EPICENTRE OF CONFLICT. IT’S TOO VALUABLE, ACCORDING TO PLAYERS IN THE ONGOING CIVIL WAR.
THE ACME OF LEVANTINE CULTURE LAID WASTE BY CIVIL WAR
Al eppo, l i ke 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 of 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 Tamerlane 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.”
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.
“Assad wants it, because if he can take Aleppo, he’ll have the northern capital. He’ll have all the cities. Then the rebels are just a bunch of hillbillies,” he says. “They will be marginal, and he will close in on them in time.”
For the Kurds, the country north of Aleppo is their chance to consolidate a proto-statelet across northern Syria, linking it to enclaves they have carved out farther east. Such an outcome is unacceptable to Turkey, which is supplying many of the non-Kurdish rebel militias. And these militias are fighting so fiercely for Aleppo in no small part to keep their supply lines open to Turkey.
While all these factors are intrinsic to Syria’s current civil war, they are also nearly timeless. Aleppo has been fought over for millenniums precisely because it is a gateway to Anatolia, the sea and the desert.
It lies where nomads crossed paths with settled farmers and urbanized merchants, a city whose ancient walls have echoed with dozens of languages and a multiplicity of prayers, hymns and calls to worship. Its food became famous because it was infused with the world. All this made Aleppo magnificent. It made Aleppo fragile. And it made it a target.
Aleppo grew out of the Fertile Crescent, which arches from the Nile River Valley, through the Levant to Mesopotamia, and flourished as a crossroads connecting Constantinople (later Byzantium and Istanbul) and Anatolia with Mosul and other Silk Road cities to the east.
Although it is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, Aleppo’s “finest hour,” according to University of Toronto historian James Reilly, came during the era of Ottoman rule (15161918), when it was “the heart of a vast empire at the nexus of lucrative trade routes.”
But Aleppo has also always been more than a commercial hub.
“If we want to look at camels as the ships of the desert, those caravans and camels radiated out of Arabia and around this giant desert, and they landed in these port cities — whether they were Aleppo and Damascus, Hama or Homs,” says Landis.
West of Aleppo are fertile land, mountains and, eventually, a real ocean: the Mediterranean Sea. This puts the city on another margin that has shaped it. Gertrude Bell, the early 20thcentury English archeologist and spy, titled her memoir of Syria after this divide, The Desert and Sown, a description still used by academics and human geographers.
Those who live in the desert tend to be Sunni Arabs. The mountains and sown lands to the west and north are the traditional homes of a more diverse array of Levantine ethnicities and religions: Shia and Alawite Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, Turks and Kurds.
But Aleppo also absorbed influences from far beyond the Middle East. In Shakespeare’s Othello, the eponymous character describes a dispute in the city between a Venetian and a “malignant” and “turbaned” Turk. (Othello killed the Turk.)
During the 18th century, Aleppo became a major centre for Ottoman trade with Europe’s Christian states. Some of the city’s Orthodox Christian inhabitants converted to Catholicism, says Reilly, to tap “new sources of patronage and support.”
T.E. Lawrence, before he became Lawrence of Arabia, used to enjoy recuperating in Aleppo’s Baron’s Hotel, declaring in a letter home that it was “a splendid place to spend a week in.” He was struck by the city’s European feel, writes his biographer.
Lawrence later spent the First World War blowing up Ottoman trains in the company of his comrades, Sunni Arab desert tribesmen all.
“Aleppo was a great Syrian city, but not of it, nor of Anatolia, nor of Mesopotamia,” he wrote in his wartime memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. “There the races, creeds and tongues of the Ottoman Empire met and knew one another in a spirit of compromise.
“It was typical of Aleppo that in it, while yet Mohammedan feeling ran high, more fellowship should rule between Christian and Mohammedan, Armenian, Arab, Turk, Kurd and Jew, than in perhaps any other great city in the Ottoman Empire.”
After the war, many survivors of the Armenian genocide, along with Assyrian Christians, moved to Aleppo, swelling the city’s Christian population.
There was a generally ordered harmony between religious and ethnic communities during most of the 20th century, says Landis, although he notes that rates of intermarriage were fairly low.
“Religion was never an issue,” remembers, Hassan, a 75-year-old Aleppine doctor, now living in exile who did not want his real name published. “We went to the same schools, jobs, everything. There was really no discrimination. Most friends in Syria are Christian people. I’m Muslim.”
When Syrians marched, then rebelled against Assad, much of Aleppo declined to join them.
Landis says many of the city’s elite and middle class were too invested in the existing order to risk upending it. Rebels tried to cajole them with songs, he says, reciting one: “Oh, Aleppo, you are our sweetheart, but you’re a traitor. Why don’t you rise up?
“Shaming them, using every trick in the book to try to prick their national consciousness,” he says. “And they didn’t get easily pricked, because they didn’t want their flat TVs stolen.”
Hassan, who left Aleppo three years ago, says revolutionaries from Homs who fled Assad’s forces there came to Aleppo, moved in to its poorer neighbourhoods and changed the city’s dynamics and its population’s attitude toward the Assad regime.
“Once you are chased out of your house with your family and children, there’s no logic to what you can do,” he says. “And of course the opportunists, they come and prey on these people and give them money. On top of that, the government starts bombing the countryside around the cities, whether it’s Aleppo or Damascus.”
Hassan says he would like there to be democracy in Syria one day but doesn’t embrace any of the belliger- ents fighting Syria’s civil war. Aleppo, he says, no longer belongs to people who live there.
“It’s in the hands of militias — whether government militias or opposition militias. Everybody thinks they’re on the right side, and whoever pays a salary dictates on a group what to do and what to day.”
Hassan still has a 98-yearold mother living in Aleppo. He would like to go back to look after her, but he’s not sure that will ever be possible. He can’t predict whether Aleppo’s communities will reconcile.
His grief is shared by Maya Atassi, an engineer now living in Montreal, who left Aleppo because her activism against the Assad regime made it too dangerous for her to stay. She says the city, once like one family, is now divided against itself.
“It’s not depending on their religion. It depends on their view to the revolution,” she says. She allows that Christians are “a little bit” more likely to support the government, but attributes this to fear.
“Assad put this idea in their head that he will save all the other small religions in Syria, and if he’s gone the Sunni will kill them. And it’s not true. We were neighbours. We were friends,” she says.
All that Syria once was, and is now losing, is symbolized by Aleppo’s downward spiral.
The city was rich because it was diverse. It flourished because it straddled frontiers and brought people together. It was a meeting place, somewhere cultures collided and built on what came before. Landis likens it to a palimpsest, a parchment that bears the traces of earlier manuscripts.
“Aleppo was the pinnacle, the acme, of this Levantine Arab culture — of fine cuisine; of great poets; literature; the souk; all these Ottoman houses with great courtyards, amazing mosaics and worked wood. All the layers of history are recorded in Aleppo. And now the souk has been burnt. Many of the Ottoman homes have been destroyed. That history that had been layered like a palimpsest has been scraped clean,” he says.
“I think we’re seeing the brutal levelling of Aleppo. For all the reasons that Aleppo was the great cosmopolitan centre, it is also going to be the well of despond.”