INSIDE THE CITY OF HELL
It’s a madhouse. An appalling affront to humanity. RICHARD PENDLEBURY, the Mail’s veteran war reporter, has covered many bloody conflicts. But nothing, he says, prepared him for the horrors he witnessed this week in Aleppo
THERE is no longer any electricity to light what is left of one the world’s oldest cities. And so the late-evening sky above Aleppo is as clear, star-filled and beautiful as it might have been two millennia ago.
This is but a small comfort amid the drumbeat of artillery. Night or day, what lies beneath the heavens here is an affront to humanity.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Sangari is resting on a trolley in a corridor of Al-Razi hospital’s emergency department. His head, arms and legs are swathed in bandages, while a much smaller boy, probably his little brother, is holding Mohammed’s feet and weeping.
The rocket had struck around 10.30am that morning. Mohammed and his two younger cousins were helping to load furniture onto a van ahead of their families’ flight from the district of New Aleppo and the latest bombardment there.
Now, one cousin, a four-year-old boy, is dead and a second, a girl aged six, fights for her life with head wounds. Mohammed was ‘lucky’, you could say.
Another stretcher is squeezed past, carrying a bare-chested young man with a round and bloody hole in his solar plexus. To me, it looks like a gunshot wound, but someone says it was caused by a piece of rocket.
The important detail is that it was enough to kill him. Seconds later his hysterical mother appears through the doorway.
‘My child’s dead!’ she screams, clutching her head. ‘ God help us! Please God, help us.’ The dead man was an off- duty doctor. His mother is noisily inconsolable and finally collapses with grief. This is a madhouse. Truly terrible. Outside, the ambulances are wailing to a halt every couple of minutes. The regular background thuds of outgoing and incoming artillery and heavy mortar- fire grow more urgent in what is the centre of a major city of two million people.
Several of the casualties are men in camouflage uniform, fresh from the outer frontlines. But most are civilians.
In a side street at the back of the hospital, the mortuary entrance is to be found. Here, weeping relatives gather and those obviously beyond medical help are delivered.
A car is parked at the kerb and the rear door is wide open.A stout middle-aged woman is sprawled across the backseat as if asleep, arms thrown above her head.
Everything about her is a strange concrete grey. No one pays her much attention because she has no more life in her than the building under which she was buried. She and the car are moved.
Almost at once a pick-up truck takes their place. A handsome old man with a large moustache and covered in rubble dust is lying in the back. His eyes are open and seemingly returning my stare, but he, too, is dead.
ANd nearby there is the grotesque scene of two stretcher bearers trying to fit the corpse of a woman into the back of a tiny yellow taxi while her sobbing teenage son strokes the bloodied sheet that covers her.
News was also coming through of two massive car bombs. The mortuary will be busier than ever.
This was government-held western Aleppo on Thursday afternoon.
The tragic city of Syria’s mostuncivil of civil wars is split in two.
A short distance away from the hospital, across a bitterly contested frontline, the eastern side of the city remains under siege by the forces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
The besieged area has largely been reduced to ruins, although there was no means of reaching it this week to verify conditions.
Most of the residents have fled. But since July, as many as 250,000 have been trapped and are reportedly living in squalor under the constant threat of death. President Assad’s autocratic and oppressive regime had been subject to international sanctions long before the current crisis.
Since the conflict broke out in 2011, it has been accused of using indiscriminate force against civilian areas, including improvised barrel bombs full of shrapnel dropped by helicopters.
Hospitals in rebel areas have been targeted, say his opponents. There have been reports of chemical weapons attacks.
NOT long ago, Assad’s power seemed to be slipping away as rebel factions spearheaded by hard-line Islamist groups such as the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front united to roll back the exhausted government forces.
But the tide has turned, it seems. The key to Assad’s resurgence has been the intervention of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its modern airpower.
The scent — or rather, stench — of a once unlikely ‘victory’ is in the air. That is why I was among a small group of Western journalists who had been allowed in by a previously closed and hostile regime.
Presumably we were there to share the good tidings. After five years of grinding catastrophe, President Assad could be on the verge of retaking the whole of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city and one- time economic hub.
The fight is seen by many as the key battle in this whole bloody conflict, which has so far claimed as many as 400,000 lives and displaced millions. A conflict that began following the 2011 Arab Spring with antigovernment protests which were brutally put down, before escalating into a full- scale civil war, pitching rebel groups from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority against Assad’s Shia Muslim sect, called the Alawites.
The rebel groups range from moderates to hardline Islamic terrorists, and the carnage has not only allowed the barbaric Islamic State to flourish, but sucked in a U.S.-led coalition and, of course, Assad-supporting Russia.
In the face of international pressure, Russian aircraft have not hit eastern Aleppo for two weeks, the country says, in order to allow civilians to escape and the rebels to withdraw.
The regime claims that, on a previous occasion where a ceasefire afforded a similar opportunity, jihadist fighters fired on designated ‘humanitarian corridors’ to prevent civilians from escaping.
There is to be another chance, however. Syria and Russia announced that six humanitarian corridors were to be opened yesterday morning for civilians to leave eastern Aleppo.
Another two corridors would allow the rebels to leave the city for other opposition-controlled parts of the country. Syrian jets were over the city on Thursday afternoon, dropping leaflets carrying messages to that effect.
But when the deadline for this evacuation ended at 7pm local time last night, there would be, as one local politician put it euphemistically, an ‘escalation’. Regime troops are already massing for the assault.
The rebels know what is coming. So they have redoubled their own efforts against Assad’s forces.
For the past fortnight, regimeheld western Aleppo has been peppered by mortar and rockets, mainly fired by opposition fighters massed in the countryside to the west.
They are trying, once again, to break the encirclement of the siege from the outside. Around 100 civilians have died as a result, with many times that number wounded.
The authorities here say 11,000 civilians have been killed in western Aleppo since the war began — a third of them children.
United Nations special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said he was ‘appalled and shocked by the
high number of rockets indiscriminately launched’ on civilian suburbs of government-held Aleppo.
‘Those who argue that this is meant to relieve the siege of eastern Aleppo should be reminded that nothing justifies the use of disproportionate and indiscriminate weapons, including heavy ones, on civilian areas and it could amount to war crimes,’ de Mistura said.
The Aleppo I saw this week is no longer about whose side you are on. As a local priest said, it has simply become ‘the most dangerous city in the world’.
My long journey to Aleppo from the capital Damascus was via a precarious route through government-held central Syria.
The highway often goes close to rebel opposition territory, including that held by Islamic State. It still comes under attack and is sometimes cut.
The desolation we saw en route in the city of Homs, from which armed opposition groups withdrew under a ceasefire in May 2014, was as nothing compared with what awaited at the journey’s end.
WHeN we neared Aleppo the signs of ongoing war increased. We had heard the steady boom of a Syrian army howitzer battery firing heavy shells at some target far into the desert long before we came across the gun itself.
Most of the roadside villages were abandoned and destroyed.
On the wall of one ruined house someone had painted ‘ God is protecting Syria’. A joke — or a sign of misplaced optimism?
Convoys of lorries carrying supplies to the government-held part of the city slowed our progress. As the shadows lengthened, the suburbs came into sight, smoke rising on the skyline.
The thump of artillery was again noticeable as we were passing close to where the rebels to the west of the city are attempting to break through the siege.
Bitter fighting had taken place here and little more was needed to make the devastation complete.
No wall was unmarked by weaponry. A line of buses had been turned on their sides atop an earth bank to make ramparts. Tall residential blocks had folded like partially collapsed decks of cards. Poster after poster of President Assad lined the route. He at least was smiling.
That night we were taken to the Christian quarter of west Aleppo.
Much of it borders the ‘redline’ with the rebel-held east, causing a number of churches including the Maronite cathedral to be abandoned. The majority of the faithful — who had numbered 200,000, or 7 per cent of the city’s population before the ‘crisis’ — have fled.
Mortars and rockets have fallen on their areas — though causing nothing like the destruction and death of the regime airstrikes or barrel bombs on the other side.
The Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Assumption still has a large hole punched high through its wall by the choir loft. It marks where a rocket entered during Mass, injuring ten. The ‘ cultural mosaic’ that existed in Syria, of many different faiths living side by side, has been fractured if not destroyed by this dreadful war. Now religious minorities such as these embattled Christians look more than ever to the Assad regime for protection.
‘Don’t ever say they are “rebels”,’ one local Presbyterian priest told me, after posing for pictures with two moderate Sunni clerics on the altar of his church. ‘These terrorists killed our children and destroyed our homes and tried to kill our existence and history.’
The next morning I met two little girls, 12-year- old Nour and Hala, eight, carrying bread back to their home in a ruined apartment block in a devastated street on the edge of the Shihan neighbourhood. They had only moved there three weeks earlier because the fighting meant their real homes were not safe.
Then around the corner came Ahmed and Bilal, both ten, lugging two plastic jerry- cans and on the hunt for water. They, too, are refugees from another part of Aleppo. ‘There were too many bombs and too many people died,’ said Bilal. ‘It is safer here.’
Later, we are led through the ruins of the Old City, once a Unesco World Heritage Site, but now destroyed.
The elegant Khan Al-Wazir gate has been mauled by gun and rocket fire, the ancient souk burned out.
To cross in the open to the walls of the Citadel would invite instant death. The frontline is here and the deserted streets are barricaded to block snipers. Only one shop is still open and it is where Mahmoud Mehmi sells falafel to passing soldiers. ‘Perhaps 30 customers a day.’
Aside from Mr Mehmi’s token presence, 2,000 years of trade and human interaction in a once charming warren of alleyways has come to end.
DO NOT ask about culpability. Foreign Minister Walid Muallem is 75 years old; short, very fat and sometimes even quite jolly looking. But he is also as tough as teak and was not about to pussyfoot with Western journalists. Indeed, the first question was fired by him: ‘Who can tell me why this hysteria in the West about Aleppo?’ he demanded.
‘The Syrian citizens in the [rebelheld] east of Aleppo are very dear to us. We care about their wellbeing. We want to liberate them.
‘If we win Aleppo — and I am sure we will — it is up to the West to rethink their policies.’
Pressed on accountability for the regime’s alleged war crimes — not to mention its blame for creating the conditions which sparked the initial revolt — Mr Muallem was evasive.
Aleppo hospitals had not been targeted by Russian or Syria airstrikes, he said gruffly: ‘Your information is mistaken.’ Mistakes may have been made, ‘but this is war’.
The biggest errors were being committed by the U.S., whom he described as the ‘godfather’ of a mafia of countries including Britain that have set themselves against Syria.
President Assad was ‘not a leader who will run away’, he promised. ‘The people chose him.’
The Foreign Minister lit up a cigarette and joked that there was no smoking ban ‘ on Syrian territory’, as there is under the Islamic State. What ‘freedom’. And what an unexpected ‘victory’ almost within his master’s grasp.
As I write this in the early hours of Friday morning, the Aleppo night vibrates with heavy explosions as shells continue to fall indiscriminately — on both sides of the city’s divide.