Staying alive in the rubble of Aleppo
Every war produces an iconic image, perhaps more than one. For those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, perhaps even fought in it, who can forget the image of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong prisoner in the head? Or the little girl running down the road naked after her village was attacked with napalm? Or an American soldier in the jungle, holding in his lap the head of his wounded buddy, refusing to leave him?
For each of us, these pictures pierce the soul in an individual way, defining the war for us forever.
This week, the world was deeply shocked, as well as touched, by the picture of Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year-old Syrian boy pulled from the ruins of his bombed house in Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city that had once been home to more than 2 million people.
The warplane that had done this to him was a Syrian bomber, but it could have been one of a number of nationalities, including American.
Omran had been placed in a little chair in an ambulance and sat quietly, covered in ash, looking around him and touching his head wounds and bloodied face. How long had he lain in the rubble of his home? He was too shocked to speak. Omran sat alone, his parents not yet found. Eventually they were discovered, and little Omran, unlike many others his age, was reunited with his family. According to one doctor, Omran was still unable to speak.
Several hundred thousand people have been killed in Syria’s protracted civil war, and several million displaced, either in Syria itself or on the long migrant road to Europe. Aleppo has been under siege since 2012 and is generally reckoned to be the worst-hit city in the country.
Four years is a long time to be under the guns and the bombs. The Russians of all people should know this. All they need do is remember the siege of Leningrad during World War II, one of the war’s great tragedies, as well as a tale of extraordinary heroism and bravery. Russia now bears much of the responsibility for the suffering in Syria, no matter what their intentions.
Perhaps Donald Trump can convince his friend Vladimir Putin of this fact, but I doubt it.
There is an acute humanitarian crisis in Aleppo that has finally led to an agreement between the Russians, who support Syrian President Bashar Assad, and others, to halt the fighting long enough to bring sufficient food and medical supplies into the city.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador says Russia must follow up its announcement of support for these weekly 48-hour ceasefires to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered to the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo with action to make this happen.
Perhaps Omran will benefit from this long-delayed moment of relief. Perhaps not.
His plight does not seem to be worse than that of other children in the fabled city of Aleppo; nor is it any better. It is his picture that sticks in the mind: shocked, tousled hair, silent. One wants to reach out and hold him, to make him safe. Such is the power of an image.
I’ve been in Aleppo several times, though I cannot say I know it well. I did think, however, that with its massive hilltop citadel, it was more impressive than Damascus, Syria’s capital. Its huge, covered souk, or market, was a fabulous place, with shoppers having to sidestep the city’s many donkeys in order to make one’s way through the dark ,narrow streets and into one of the many shops lit with hanging brass lanterns.
Aleppo was the Ottoman Empire’s third largest city after Constantinople and Cairo. It had dominated northern Syria for centuries, and it was one of the great cities of antiquity.
In fact, like Damascus, Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and its near destruction is a cultural disaster. It was Aleppo’s strategic location at the end of the Silk Road and lying between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia — today’s Iraq — that made it into a great trading center.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, however, meant that much of the trade between East and West went through the canal, bypassing the great city of Aleppo at the edge of the desert. It has been a struggle ever since for Aleppo to maintain itself as a trading center and not just a collection of ancient monuments.
Now, too, those monuments may be gone.
Bill Stewart writes about current affairs from Santa Fe. He is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and worked as a correspondent for Time magazine
Aleppo has been under siege since 2012 and is generally reckoned to be the worst-hit city in the country. Four years is a long time.