A painful pilgrimage to an icon of Aleppo

Aleppo: Her face was ashen, her solemn manner suggesting a state of grief.

“It is as though we lost a close relative,” Haymen Rifai, 60, explained gravely as she stood with her two daughters in the war-pulverised centre of Aleppo. “Each time we come here it feels worse.”

She had not lost a loved one, but rather a cherished, stone-and-mortar symbol: the historic Umayyad Mosque, which Rifai and her family had come to visit on this sun-drenched afternoon _ part of a daily, if forlorn, pilgrimage to the grievously wounded house of worship in the heart of the Old City.

Another visitor, Mohammad Marsi, 41, and his son surveyed the vast courtyard once distinguished by intricate geometric designs in alternating black and white stones. Now the stones were chipped or shattered, or hidden by mud or implements of war.

“The destruction for the whole country is indescribable, just like what happened to the mosque,” said Marsi. “If you knew the mosque before the damage, and saw it now, it is like someone who lost a child or part of his body.”

The sublime mosque, along with the nearby, medieval-era covered souq, have long been synonymous with Aleppo, the core of which the United Nations declared a World Heritage site.

The mosque and the souq, along with much of the Old City, suffered calamitous harm during the more than four years that this former Silk Road hub was divided between opposition fighters and forces loyal to the government of President Bashar Al Assad.

The mosque, souq and adjoining districts were transformed into First World War-style front lines, featuring trenches lined with sandbags, fortified tunnels, sniper emplacements and near-daily shelling.

Construction on the earliest mosque on the site began in 715, and through the centuries the complex has been rebuilt and renovated again and again after earthquakes and fires, looting and war. The mosque’s signature minaret, nearly 150 feet tall, had survived since 1090.

But in April 2013, clashes reduced the minaret to a pile of rubble and also collapsed the mosque complex’s northwestern wall. The rebels blamed Syrian forces. Syria blamed the rebels.

But the huge scale of destruction only began to become clear to the outside world in December. That’s when opposition fighters and their supporters finally decamped from their last strongholds in Aleppo city after months of government bombardment.

Since then, thousands of Aleppo residents who fled the city have returned from their places of exile. For many returnees, among the first stops has been the Old City and the beloved Umayyad mosque. Visiting here has become a rite of passage for individuals and families.

“This is the first time for me to come to the mosque since the war and I was really shocked,” said Soha Al Khatib, 54. “I saw a lot of pictures of the mosque on the internet, but I didn’t expect to see this amount of damage. There are no words that can describe my sadness, my pain.”

Though cleanup efforts have been underway for months, its walls remain riddled with bullet holes and pocked with shrapnel. Sandbags and 55-gallon drums filled with dirt mark where opposition fighters dug in against relentless government bombardment. Bullets and blasts have damaged some of the regal interior chandeliers, though many remain intact.

A pair of washing or ablution fountains in the courtyard still stand, but are shot through and through. Gouges from bullets and shells mar the elegant porticoes and grand wooden front doors.

Still, the people come. And still, it is their mosque.

“I have always visited this mosque, its feel, its smell _ it is the essence of Aleppo,” said Abdullah Bayoud, 56, a truck driver who was among the many stopping to pray at the walled-off shrine inside the mosque said to contain a relic of Zakariyah, a prophet and father of Prophet Yahya, known as John the Baptist in Christian faith.

“Zakariyah is the protector of Aleppo,” said Bayoud, a father of seven who, like so many others here, fled his home during the fighting. “He is with our city.”

Both the mosque and the souk, shielded by stone walls at times more than 3 feet thick, appear structurally sound, despite the immense damage. But restoration is a huge undertaking that will take years, officials say, and cost many millions of dollars. Full repair will probably await the end of a war now into its seventh year.