The Morning They Came for Us (15 page)

De Mistura had left Europe faintly confident – he had seen Assad in Damascus a few days before and had got his word that there would be a lull in the bombing for six weeks to allow humanitarian aid to pass through. De Mistura had also announced – to the horror of the Syrian opposition – that
any political process would have to involve Assad. At dawn on 17 February, hours before de Mistura in New York got ready to lay out his freezing plan for Aleppo (which had, in part, been conceived by a young American analyst, Nir Rosen, who was working for an NGO called the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue), the battle broke out.

Later, the rebels fought back. More dead, more bodies lying in the muddy winter of Aleppo. De Mistura gave a grim reading to a few UN reporters gathered outside the Security Council hall, but he would not take questions. Just like Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, the two former special envoys, both veterans of ending prior wars, he looked defeated.

As reports were being read aloud in New York, and ambitious bureaucrats beavered away at their desks overlooking Lake Geneva, the history of Aleppo was fast disappearing. The souk and the covered bazaar, which date back to the fifteenth century and were carefully remodelled by governors and a Grand Vizier in the sixteenth century, served as a front line in this battle. In 2012, Stefan Knost,
¹⁴
a German historian who had taken part in excavations in pre-war Aleppo, said: ‘We must unfortunately assume that either large sections of the bazaar have already been destroyed, or will be destroyed.' Three years later, there were snipers poised in crevices of the old walls, destruction, ruins.

The government forces stayed inside the Citadel, a fortified medieval palace once occupied by Greeks, Byzantines, Mamaluks. The government forces now use the walls of the former UNESCO world heritage site as barriers, and in the heights snipers nest, laying their rifles against the ancient stone.

What occurred inside those walls, in peaceful times when ancient people occupied it? But even history seems irrelevant now. The most important thing is to hide from bullets.

‘The most difficult thing is not being able to feed your kids,' Umm Hamid said on my first night in Aleppo. She was a woman of average age, height, weight, everything indistinguishable under her full
abaya
. She had sallow skin, rough-pored and dirty hands, rubber slippers on her feet. We were in her home in Bustan al-Qasr, a neighbourhood between the old Citadel and the Queiq River, where civilians had been killed and tossed aside, their purple and swollen bodies floating on the tide.

Bustan al-Qasr was now a crossing-point between rebel-held and regime-held areas. There were snipers everywhere – positioned on the top floors of government buildings – and the streets were not safe. People needed to move between the two points, to work, to study – the University was on the regime-held side of the city – or to try to find food. There was a marketplace, but it too was targeted by snipers. To reach some buildings, you had to climb through holes that had been knocked out, or rather bombed out, of the walls, and you reached the other side from the inside. Rabbit warrens, little tunnels, short cuts to trick death.

As in Sarajevo during the siege, people used inoperative buses and piled sandbags to try to shield themselves from the snipers. It looked strange at first, then you got used to seeing them and they appeared normal. When we left our car to get
to Umm Hamid's flat, we moved quietly, heads down, silently and quickly. It was always a relief to get into the car, even though in reality a sniper's bullet or a rocket or anything else can cut through the side door or window.

In a few months' time, O., our driver, would be badly injured in exactly that manner, in this same car, in this same city. It would take him a year to recover from his bullet wounds, his broken bones.

By the time I arrived in Aleppo, every neighbourhood was now a fiefdom, dictated by political survival and black-market criminality. The people were caught in the middle. It wasn't clear who was in control of Bustan al-Qasr that week. In August, it was Ahrar Surya, one of the city's largest rebel brigades. No one knew who was in charge on the day I arrived.

O. whispered: ‘Best not to ask too many questions.' He found his gun under the car seat, and slid it back under, further away from the foot well. I asked him not to carry it – he stared back at me wordlessly as if to say, you know nothing.

Through the dirty car windows splattered with rain and mud, I could see Umm Hamid's flat from the street, her main window that faced out lit up by candles inside. Nicole went first, then Paddy, then me, up four flights of stairs to the apartment in the dark, the wet tiled floors slippery and cold. Her children stood at the end of one room, shivering. I saw a row of tiny, dirty, tear-streaked faces.

We stretched out sleeping bags in the front room. Through her windows, the street looked baneful: empty except for a few people carrying torches, illuminating small puddles near their feet with a pale yellow light. There were thuds of shelling
and the occasional pop of a sniper's gun. A few FSA – Free Syrian Army – rebel fighters gathered on the corner.

Umm Hamid is a ‘laqab' (an Arabic epithet that identifies a person), meaning Mother of Hamid. Her husband was a local sheikh, regarded with respect in the neighbourhood as a decision-maker, someone to trust. Their address had been given to us via safe contacts as a place we could trust, arranged through SMS from the Turkish border via local mobile phones.
How safe is your apartment? When will your husband be back? Will we be able to stay with you without anyone knowing we are there? We'll arrive after dark so no one sees us.

She made us tea and spoke of the children. ‘When they wake up at night and want a glass of water, you can't give it to them,' she said, squatting on the floor and pouring the tea into dirty glasses. ‘When they wake up at night and want to go to the bathroom, they can't. When they wake up at night and ask me to stop the bombs, I can't do that either.'

Then there was the lack of food. She spoke of what she missed, of what she had lost, of what she felt she would never regain. ‘Before the war, there were fruit trees,' she said, almost longingly. Then she began to talk about them, memory as a way of never forgetting. Apples, tangerines, pears and plums, pomegranates and jasmine.

Nights in Bustan al-Qasr were clamorous. There were more than a dozen people in the flat and the mixture of human sounds, coughing, crying, snoring, laughing, mingled with the shooting and detonations outside the window. When I woke up in the morning, wrapped in a sleeping bag in all my clothes, one of her smaller children was sobbing. She didn't
want to go outside, she said in a broken voice. She was frightened. Please, Mama, she begged.

Umm Hamid dressed the crying girl. She stuffed her miniature hands into socks instead of gloves to keep them warm. She was taking her to queue outside the bakery in the Kadi Askar neighbourhood. There was no one to leave the girl with, she said unapologetically, so she was bringing her to stand in the line with her. They might be waiting all day, she told us.

‘If we get there early, we might be lucky,' she whispered to the little girl.

If she were lucky, she would not be living in Aleppo. If she were lucky, she would not have to cook on a wood stove. If she were lucky, her children could play outside, or not be afraid of the balcony, where people shot at you when you stuck your head out. If she were lucky, her husband would not have been jobless for the past four months. If she were lucky, there would be no war.

The Arabic name for Aleppo is Halab. Some people say it means iron, or possibly copper, because the city was a source of these metals in ancient times. But there is also a biblical legend that Halab means ‘the giver of milk', because Abraham allegedly gave out milk to travellers when they passed through the city.

But the city called the giver of milk has now ground to a halt, except for the fighting. Umm Hamid has not had milk at home for months. She had powdered milk, she said.

Eventually, Umm Hamid coaxed the protesting girl, holding her by the arm, and we followed her down the stairs. On
the staircase, she saw her younger son wearing rubber sandals outside on the street instead of shoes. December is cold in Aleppo, covered by grey mud and raked by icy wind. She stared at him, but she did not go inside to get him socks: she did not have any. Nor did he have shoes.

She just stared at the boy's feet, purple with cold, then hurried on to the bakery. There was nothing for him to do, and nothing for her to say.

We took the small child to the market and bought him shoes, which he silently laced up. But he was one child. There were dozens, hundreds, thousands in Aleppo that did not have his tiny shred of luck that day.

War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain – everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.

If you are critically ill – with cancer, for instance – there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return – polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks – from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.

As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who
remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.

Wartime looks like this.

The steely greyness of the city. The clouds are so low, but not low enough to hide government helicopters carrying barrel bombs, which usually appear at the same time each day, in the mornings and late afternoons, circling for a while at altitudes of 13,000–16,000 feet, little more than tiny dots in the sky, before dropping their payloads.

What does war sound like? The whistling sound of the bombs falling can only be heard seconds before impact – enough time to know that you are about to die, but not enough time to flee.

What does the war in Aleppo smell of? It smells of carbine, of wood smoke, of unwashed bodies, of rubbish rotting, of the heady smell of fear. The rubble on the street – the broken glass, the splintered wood that was once somebody's home. On every corner there is a destroyed building that may or may not have bodies still buried underneath. Your old school is gone; so are the mosque, your grandmother's house, and your office. Your memories are smashed.

Then there are the endless fields of garbage. The rooms that are as cold as tombs – having gone unheated now for five winters – are all you know. There are so many abandoned apartments. Remember that beautiful house, what it
looked like when someone lived there? Your beautiful life from before is now dead.

The dirt, filth, fear and nausea. All the things you go without – toothpaste, money, vitamins, birth-control pills, X-rays, chemotherapy, insulin, painkillers. Petrol costs 170 Syrian pounds per litre. Today. Tomorrow it might be different.

Then, suddenly, you might catch the odd sight of a man in a T-shirt despite the frozen air, squeezing oranges into juice for the lucky ones with money. Oranges? You wonder who the people are that still have money, and you have dark thoughts about people you used to trust and know well. But with the constant theme of survival surrounding your whole city, your neighbourhood, your life, you really don't know anybody's intentions.

War is the corner near the Old City where people are lined up with plastic Pepsi bottles, to buy a small amount of petrol on the black market. War is the wrecked hospital, Dar al-Shifa, bombed on 21 November 2012, which still stinks of carnage in hallways where stretchers once passed, and where doctors in scrubs and rubber gloves once walked. Now it is a twisted pile of cinderblocks and concrete, broken tiles and glass – a shell exposed to the grey sky.

War is empty shell casings on the street, smoke from bombs rising up in mushroom clouds, and learning to determine which thud means what kind of bomb. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don't.

War is the destruction, the skeleton and the bare bones of someone else's life.

*   *   *

In 2006, Aleppo won the title of Islamic City of Culture awarded by the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Historic landmarks were restored. Tourism was up. Aleppo was going to be the new Marrakesh, an exotic destination with pleasant weather, boutique hotels, interesting restaurants and direct flights from Paris or London. An exotic, Eastern city with beguiling buildings made from gold-coloured stone.

Aleppo was famous for its olive-oil soap and its refined houses in the old city. Encouraged by the well-dressed willowy wife of Bashar al-Assad, Asma – who had been profiled in a glowing article in American
Vogue
just before the government ordered security forces to fire on unarmed protesters – fashion designers, artists and writers who were her friends began to buy property. In Paris, just before the Arab Spring, I met the most elegant people who were proud to be flying to Aleppo to buy art and furniture. When the protests started, and I phoned them to ask about what had happened to Aleppo, to their homes, to their parties, they would not take my calls.

But I have seen this happen before. The celerity with which life as you know it breaks down is overwhelming. The beautiful people stop coming. The water stops, taps run dry, banks go, and a sniper kills your brother. There is nowhere to seek recourse, and barely time to grieve before you see a helicopter flying in the sky and hear the thwack of another bomb. You get used to hallucinations appearing in broad daylight. The dead and mangled return to you, over and over, and not just in dreams. Once you see one dead body – the shoes ripped off from the force of an explosion – you never forget what it looks like.