The imposing silhouette of the citadel of Aleppo is outlined by the moonlight. Sellers of cotton candy and roasted corn greet Syrian families dressed in their Sunday best, strolling along the promenade next to the moat. From a covered terrace, the notes of a traditional music concert escape, played for a handful of the privileged members of Aleppo’s elite. In the cafes with their Christmas lights, the smell of hookahs mixes with the intoxicating voice of Sabah Fakhri, the lost glory of Arabic song, native to the city. On a summer evening, everyone tries to forget the wounds of war and the harshness of the economic crisis.
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The “Syrian Notebooks” are a series of reports compiled in the summer of 2024. For security reasons, some of the people quoted speak under pseudonyms. For these same reasons, the names of the authors of these reports are not mentioned.
Dominating the city, the medieval citadel was the scene of the battle that pitted, from July 2012 to December 2016, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, entrenched behind the walls and in the western districts of Aleppo, against the rebels who controlled the historic city, centre and eastern districts. After two sieges and devastating battles, the regime army, supported by the Russian air force and Shiite militias close to Iran, ended up retaking the city.
The scars of these clashes are still visible in the destroyed buildings of the ghost district next to the citadel and in the blackened ruins of the souk. Of the city’s nearly 3 million inhabitants before the war, more than 30,000 were killed – the vast majority civilians – and 1 million fled, according to a count by the NGO Violation Documentation Center, the center for documenting rape in Syria. Half of the homes were destroyed or damaged, mainly in the eastern neighborhoods. A third of the historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was reduced to ashes. What remains is severely degraded. The earthquake that devastated northeastern Syria and neighboring Turkey on February 6, 2023 further darkened this sad picture.
The ancient and prosperous martyr city at the crossroads of the Silk Roads, the economic heart of Syria before the 2011 revolution, has lost part of its cultural heritage and its industrial fabric. “It is a part of our soul, of the identity of the city that has disappearedlaments an artist from Aleppo. Children will not know this story; it pains me to see my city divided and demolished. »
In the early morning, workers hired by the United Nations development agency cleared the rubble at the entrance to the souk. The vast covered market, which once housed thousands of stalls and several dozen centuries-old caravanserais, is only just beginning to come back to life. Rehabilitation projects, initiated in 2017, under the leadership of the Aga Khan Foundation, with UNESCO and the controversial Syrian Fund for Development, have been underway. Led by President Assad’s wife, some commercial avenues have been re-established. The Akhmad Kadyrov Foundation, linked to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Moscow, returned the 45-metre-high minaret of the Umayyad mosque, destroyed by bombing in 2013.
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