Journalists recount horrors during Aleppo visit

Aleppo: The government-held side of Aleppo looks halfway normal: bustling with restaurants, parks, swimming pools and commuters. President Bashar Al Assad’s main pitch to his people is that they are safe in the territory he controls, a far cry from the bombs and starvation on the rebels’ half of the storied and strategic city.

This is what the government wanted international journalists to see when it invited a group into the country this week after years of keeping most out. But when I stepped off the bus, I found a war zone.

The thump and crack of outgoing artillery fire sounded throughout Thursday morning, and the sounds of incoming fire were increasing. Paramedics whisked groaning men in camouflage jackets from ambulances outside Al Razi hospital, where a 14-year-old boy wept quietly. His mother had just been killed when a mortar shell hit their house; his father had died in an attack the day before.

Dr. Mazen Rahmoun, a city health official in a neat brown suit, moved gingerly through the chaos with the preternaturally calm stare of a man long ago traumatised into numbness. He and his colleagues had tallied 193 civilians killed in the past month, and now his own neighborhood, New Aleppo, was under fire as insurgents battled government forces on the edge of the city.

“My wife and family are hiding in the bathroom,” he said.

Even as Syria and Russia threatened an all-out assault on the rebel side of Aleppo, saying Friday was the last chance for people there to exit, they had been unable to put down a counteroffensive by a broad array of insurgents.

Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, has an estimated 1.5 million residents on the government side, including thousands who have fled from the east, where the United Nations says about 275,000 are trapped by government forces, suffering shortages of food and water along with indiscriminate bombing.

This is my first visit since 2001, when I wandered around the bustling old souks, which date from medieval times; visited the ancient citadel that towers at Aleppo’s heart; and admired the gleaming uniformity of cream-colored stone-clad buildings in the wealthier districts that turn pink at sunset.

Now, the citadel has been returned to its original purpose as a military stronghold, with government troops perched behind its crenelated walls. Much of the old market, whose narrow passageways became a hideout for rebels, lies burned and bombed.

I drove in Wednesday from Damascus with a dozen other journalists. We made the final approach to Aleppo through a narrow, winding government-controlled corridor, crawling behind delivery trucks and minivans. The bus wound through earthen berms and collapsed buildings, then through a choke point that has changed hands several times. Shells kicked up dust and smoke in the distance.

Then, suddenly, we were in a seemingly functional city. The green buses that have been used to evacuate civilians and rebels from besieged areas were packed with commuters. Taxis knotted up at roundabouts decorated with fountains and newly installed solar panels. Residents are far better off than they were in 2014, when it was rebels who had besieged the government side.

But a closer look revealed small signs of war: Water distribution centers, with tanks filled by wells to supplement shortages. Generators rumbling on sidewalks, to mitigate power cuts that leave the streets pitch-dark at night. And, a few doors down from our hotel, a top-floor apartment smashed by a recent shell.

We asked for rooms facing west, away from the bulk of shelling, a war correspondent’s reflex. From a high window, we could see a dark plume of smoke, silhouetted against the sunset, rising over the southwestern neighborhoods, where rebels were trying to advance. Only the next morning did we realise that the eastern face of the hotel was checkered with boarded-up windows from years of shelling.

My long absence from Aleppo meant I had missed a whole stage of its development: the restoration and gentrification of parts of the old city, the opening of boutique hotels, the flood of Turkish imports and foreign investment into what was Syria’s industrial and commercial hub.

That development push, in the first decade after Al Assad took over from his father in 2000, liberalised parts of Syria’s economy and energised the tourism industry. But it also disproportionately benefited Al Assad’s inner circle and the rich, fueling imbalances of wealth that helped spur the protests in 2011 that led to a security crackdown and civil war.

We had arrived at a critical moment, as Russia said there was only one day left to pass through a corridor it had provided for people to escape eastern Aleppo before the rebel side was flattened, a corridor through which precious few had passed.

At Al Razi hospital, I met a newly orphaned 14-year-old who was weeping. Another woman wailed and collapsed in the arms of a nurse, who struggled to keep his bloodstained hands off the back of her white sweater

“Don’t tell me he died! Don’t!” she shrieked. I only have this one son.”

“He will survive,” the nurse said, but his eyes said something different. Minutes later, the son, Hazem Sherif, 26, lay dead on a stretcher.

Outside, Itidal Shehadeh sat slumped on the sidewalk near the morgue, whimpering. Her husband, Mohammad Ayman Shehadeh, a security guard at the transportation department, had been hit by a shell while parking his car.

“I saw my father dying from the balcony,” said his son Adel, 13, crying and trembling. “I saw the mortar landing and smoke coming from my father’s car.”