‘Forgotten city’ suffers Assad’s wrath
IDLIB: At the heart of Syria’s latest humanitarian crisis, locals call Idlib “the forgotten city“, still paying the price for one day in the 1970s when the former president was pelted with tomatoes.
The city and its surroundings have suffered furious bombardments since December at the hands of Syrian forces and Russian jets, leaving hundreds dead and forcing others to flee towards the Turkish border.
With a tentative ceasefire announced on March 6, villager Malek Haj Khalil returned to his home in Sarmin, east of Idlib, hoping to recover a few belongings from the ruins of his house.
But he found nothing beyond an air-conditioning unit and a few broken pans among twisted iron bars. Some neighbours had more success, and were loading gas cookers, mattresses and sofas on to trucks.
“When the army came, it poured out all the hatred it has against us... targeting civilians and their houses,” said Khalil.
Idlib was one of the first provinces to join the uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad, and is now the last to remain in rebel hands, but the roots of that “hatred” predated the revolution in 2011.
Tucked in the northwest of the country, Idlib’s residents have long felt overlooked by their rulers in Damascus.
Locals and researchers recall the time in the early 1970s when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father who ruled from 1971 until his death in 2000, made his first and only visit to Idlib. An angry crowd pelted him with tomatoes and a shoe.
“After that, Hafez al-Assad never returned to the city. It has since been cut off, and that shows in the quality of its infrastructure and schools,” said Mohammad Sarmini, head of Syrian research centre Jusoor in Istanbul.
“It was this marginalisation that pushed Idlib to join the revolution.”
According to Taleb al-Dugheim, a specialist on Syrian history, the slight against Assad senior in Idlib “was never forgotten, and transformed into repression and marginalisation” that continued under his son.
The regime also remembers Idlib’s role in the protests of the 1980s, Dugheim said, when many supported a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama that was brutally suppressed.