Before the war you could have a leisurely breakfast in Syria's capital of Damascus and be in Aleppo in time for a late lunch at one of its famous restaurants. Today, the fast, direct route to the city has been cut. For several weeks this winter, the government-held areas of Aleppo were completely isolated, as has often been the case since the conflict began. Thanks to recent Syrian army successes, the route has been reopened, but the journey involves long and sometimes unpredictable diversions. We made the first leg of the journey to Aleppo, a 160-km drive north from Damascus to Homs, with no difficulty, pausing on the way to pick up a Syrian army lieutenant, Ali. The 22-year-old officer was returning to duty after eight days leave. He told us how he had abandoned his university engineering course three years before to volunteer for the army. It was more than two years until Ali saw his parents again. He was assigned to the defence of the Kweiris military airport to the east of Aleppo. Ali spoke of daily battles against Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, and more recently, Islamic State (IS) opponents. The airbase was inaccessible by land, so the soldiers were supplied with ammunition and supplies by helicopter. When IS joined the siege in the summer of 2014, it brought sophisticated weapons that could shoot down the helicopters. Thereafter, supplies were dropped by parachute from planes. Often the deliveries drifted off target and were picked up by the rebels. When Ali was struck in the chest by a bullet there was no evacuation. He spent 15 days convalescing inside the fort before returning to the fight. He said of IS, “They are non-humans. They are not afraid. They are not affected by injuries. Some say they take special drugs. They have more men than Al-Nusra, and they are more ferocious. They must maim the corpses of those they kill or they do not believe they are dead. When we capture them, we find ammunition, dates, drugs and ladies underwear for the virgins waiting for them in heaven.” Ali took out his mobile phone and showed me footage of gun battles against IS opponents who he said were just 75 metres away. “The secret behind the Kweiris campaign was the loyalty of the soldiers. We had no tanks, but we stood fast over four years. I lost 82 comrades,” Ali said. The siege was lifted late last year, in a signal that the tide had turned in favour of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has been supported by Russian air strikes since September of last year. Ali is now involved in mopping up IS positions around Al-Bab, a town east of Aleppo that many say is more important in military terms to IS than its Syrian headquarters in Raqqa because of its location. I had wanted to travel to Aleppo for more than a year but was unable to make the journey because I was told it was too dangerous. This changed at the start of this year as Syrian government victories meant that there was a safe road into the city. In the old days, the direct route to Aleppo would have headed through Homs to Hama, but these days there are many diversions along the way. To reach Aleppo now one has to turn onto the road heading for IS-held Raqqa and then drive directly along it. Our driver, Abdullah, makes the journey several times a week and is very experienced. This was essential: one error of navigation can lead you to an IS or Al-Nusra checkpoint. Abdullah said he had owned a textile business in the old city of Aleppo. When his house and business was destroyed, his car was his only remaining asset. “I had to face reality. I became a driver,” he said. It meant a loss of status, however. “At first, I found it hard to be called the driver. But it's a job at the end of the day and I am not ashamed,” he said. Abdullah told me about what he has faced on the road: roadside bombs, getting caught up in clashes, and fake checkpoints manned by insurgents and criminals. “They loot you or they sell you for ransom,” he said. We were now in bandit country. Abdullah said that Al-Nusra positions started just a kilometre or so to the north while IS was to the south. There were frequent checkpoints and many improvised roadside forts, artificially raised areas that were all heavily armed, with panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Between the checkpoints, Abdullah drove at breakneck speed. Then, to his frustration but my relief, we found ourselves stuck behind a military convoy. A soldier stood at the back of the final truck, waving his machine gun menacingly at any car that came too close. Though I had no way of telling, my companions told me that the convoy contained Russian as well as Syrian troops. Moscow has stepped up its military presence inside Syria in recent months, but it had been reported that its troops were concentrated in the western provinces. Eventually we turned north. I watched shepherds tending their goats as the sun set behind a range of low hills and fell asleep. When I woke up it was dark and Ali had been dropped off. We had arrived at the entrance to Aleppo. There was no street lighting and the apartment blocks were dark. Through the darkness I could see the destruction all around. ENTERING ALEPPO: Fewer than four years ago, Aleppo was a prosperous and beautiful city. Christians and Muslims lived side by side, as did Sunnis and Shias. A tolerant culture was sustained by a massive industrial centre. Aleppo's dynamic business community had developed thousands of factories in the industrial suburb of Sheikh Najjar, which employed one million residents. Inside the city there were some of the greatest treasures of world civilisation: ancient churches, mosques, the famous covered market, and the incomparable Citadel in the heart of the city. Almost everything has now been destroyed. In Damascus, the Old City survives, but many of the city's suburbs lie in ruins. In Aleppo, the centre has been gutted and much of what remains is in the hands of rebels. A journey from the east of the city to the town centre used to take half an hour. Now it lasts a day, and sometimes much more because of the roadblocks and checkpoints. For the last few years the government has ruled over the western parts of the city, while a collection of rebel forces have dominated the east. Many government areas are under regular mortar bombardment. Some of these attacks involve small mortars that inflict localised damage. The pockmarked city landscape reveals how the rebels are now using improvised gas canisters that are more like missiles than conventional mortars. These can bring down buildings or cause carnage if they land in a crowd. Aleppo's remaining hospitals are on permanent standby for influxes of mass casualties of 100 or more at a time. The lethal weapons can fall anywhere. They are one reason why more than one million residents have fled the city. Meanwhile, in rebel-held areas, human rights groups accuse the Syrian government of pummelling the city from the sky and dropping so-called barrel bombs that are often filled with shrapnel that tear through human flesh with ease. The international human rights group Amnesty International has called the widespread use of the bombs a crime against humanity. The most urgent problems in Aleppo are power and water. When I arrived in late January there had been no electricity for 112 days, with the exception of a tantalising period when it had flickered on briefly for about half an hour a day. The power station that used to supply the city's population of more than two million is in the hands of IS. The army is trying, so far without success, to recapture it. If it is not destroyed already, it certainly will be by the time the IS fighters are driven out. It is thought that last year the warring parties agreed to an energy-sharing deal that gave all sides limited access to power, but this seems to have collapsed because of the difficulty of reconciling all the divergent groups. Aleppo's second source of power used to be the national grid linking it through Hama to Damascus. Theoretically, this could still operate, but once again only if the government and the numerous rebel groups were to cooperate. That seems to be out of the question. I asked for an interview with the director of electricity but was told that he “had nothing to talk about.” It is no surprise that this unfortunate man is one of the most unpopular men in Aleppo. Meanwhile, those people who can afford to do so use private generators. In residential areas there is a chaotic mass of wires just above street level linking these generators to private apartments. However, just two amps of electricity cost about 6,000 Syrian lira ($20) a month in a country where incomes have collapsed and aid delivery is sporadic. This is enough to power lighting, but not larger electrical appliances, let alone the central heating needed to mitigate Aleppo's winter chill. Private homes are dank and for some reason seem even colder than the street outside. The latest water problem was 12 days old when I reached the city. Once again, the problem is IS. Aleppo's water supply comes from the Euphrates River via a reservoir called Lake Al-Assad, 90 km to the northeast. There is a processing plant there, from which water is pumped via Al-Nusra-controlled areas into the heart of the city. Water has been cut off by the fighting before. This time all attempts to negotiate a solution with IS have failed. This tactic does not make IS any more popular, and it can be interpreted as a sign of desperation in the face of recent military setbacks, though this is small consolation to city residents. They have responded by digging wells. As with electricity, this adds hugely to the cost of living. Residents told me they pay 1,500 lira ($5) for 1,000 litres of water, or enough to meet the basic needs of a family for about a week. To put this in perspective, water consumption in the US is about 340 litres per head every day. In Aleppo it is less than 20 litres per head. Many people don't have enough water to wash, and doctors say there is an epidemic of lice in the city. Such costs also mount up. The salary of a state employee is about 30,000 Syrian lira a month ($100). Out of this he or she will spend 6,000 lira on water and a further 6,000 lira on electricity. Rents start at 15,000 lira a month for even the most squalid accommodation. At the Jamila Market in downtown Aleppo I bought some pens and notepaper off Mahmoud, a street vendor. He said that he and his extended family lived in a single room in a nearby apartment occupied by four different families, or about 25 people in total. How did he get by? “We're alive,” he said. Like the majority of people I met, newly married Mahmoud was a refugee from a rebel-held area south of the city where he had had a good job in a jeans factory, now destroyed. Aleppo University has set aside 17 out of its 20 dormitory blocks for refugees. This is bad luck for the students who are forced to sleep eight to a room intended for two as they try to continue their studies. One man, a tailor before the war, shares a small room with his wife and seven children. He described how Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters had burned down their house, leaving one daughter with terrible burns, after he had refused to join them. He recalled that when the group invaded his area of Aleppo province on 5 July 2012 they “treated us like infidels. They made the men grow long beards and the women cover their faces”. He added, “This room is better than a castle in one of their places.” The family had managed to escape but his cousins in the FSA continue to harass him, even at the university. He said they had tried to abduct one of his daughters, but neighbours had intervened. In a nearby room a man from a family of olive oil merchants told me that Al-Nusra fighters had murdered three of his brothers-in-law for alleged pro-government sympathies. One was beheaded and one was ripped to pieces after being tied between an electricity pole and a moving car. A fourth brother had been kidnapped and no one knew where he was. All the internally displaced Syrians in government-held Aleppo had the same story to tell about the areas they had fled from: women covered and confined to the home and foreign fighters enforcing a reign of terror. They were sometimes unclear about which group they had fled from. The patchwork of alliances among the rebels groups is extremely complex and constantly changing. There are US-approved groups as well as hardline Islamist factions. All oppose the Al-Assad government and will not work with IS but are divided over tactics and ideology. Human rights groups and the UN have levelled the worst accusations of war crimes at IS, Al-Nusra and the government. However, all armed groups in Syria have been accused of gross human rights violations. “I consider myself a Syrian,” said one refugee who did not want to give his name. “We have got all kinds of religion in the country. We don't believe in sectarian politics because that's just a pretext they use to attack us.” No wonder so many people have fled. Aleppo, in common with the rest of Syria, has suffered a demographic catastrophe over the past 12 months. How many remain of the city's once-flourishing population of two million plus? Everyone speaks of the multiple losses of friends who are now in exile. Alaa Al-Sayed, a civil rights campaigner who focusses on the protection of the city's religious minorities, estimates that there are just 5,000 Armenian Christians left in the city, compared to a pre-war population of 60,000. There were 200,000 Christians altogether, made up of ethnically Arab Christians and Christian Armenians, with the Christian community in the city drawing its roots from the years shortly after the death of Christ. Al-Sayed now estimates that there are just 25,000 left. On current trends, the multi-confessional tolerance that was a feature of life in Aleppo for two millennia will soon no longer exist. However, the churches are encouraging worshippers to stay. “One of our principles is that we shouldn't leave the country when it is passing through difficult times,” said the Reverend Selimian, the pastor of the Armenian Evangelical Church. “When your mother gets sick, do you get another? We as church leaders are staying here. We say there is no reason to go.” Selimian, a graduate of the University of Chicago in the US, said, “We distribute food and pay for apartment rents. We pay for the electricity of more than 200 families. We provide medication free of charge.” He added, however, that churchgoers must ultimately make their own decisions. The poor make perilous journeys on makeshift boats across the sea from Turkey to Greece. The rich pay $7,000 for safe journeys across the same stretch of water on luxurious motor launches. Many have no choice but to flee and recent weeks have seen a fresh surge of refugees from the greater Aleppo area, reportedly caused by indiscriminate Russian bombing. TWO STORIES: Determined to hear the other side of the story, after leaving the government-held areas of Aleppo in Syria I travelled to the refugee camps in Jordan. There I heard stories of mass slaughter by pro-government militias. I met amputees whose lives had been destroyed by barrel bombs, learned of attacks by gangs carrying machetes, and of mass rape as a weapon of war. One sheep farmer from a village south of Aleppo recalled the day (3 December 2012) when the Syrian air force started bombing his village. He said they killed 1,500 people. He insisted there were no armed groups operating in the immediate vicinity. Now he lives in a makeshift camp in northern Jordan. A mother of eight children from a village near Hama in northern Syria told how she, her husband and eight children had been driven out of their village by bombing. “They slaughtered us. They dispossessed us. They destroyed everything we had. They entered our homes,” she said. She spoke of Iranian gangs with machetes who looted and maimed. “I saw it with my own eyes. Either they chopped off your right arm or your head,” she said. There is no excusing or ignoring the crimes and barbarity of the Al-Assad government and its allies. Russian bombing in Deraa, the southern city where the revolt against the Syrian government began in the spring of 2011, has caused a fresh wave of refugees to flee across the border into Jordan. At a centre for amputees, I spoke to a young man who lost his leg in a bombing raid. I asked him what he would do when he had recovered. There was no question in his mind. He would return to Deraa and fight on a mission to take revenge for the killing of family members. But the citizens of the government-held areas of Aleppo have another story to tell. They too say they are the victims of terror and barbarism. They too have experienced immeasurable loss and intimidation. They believe they are fighting to save civilisation. I should state that I stayed exclusively in government-held areas. I made no attempt to cross the lines into the rebel-held zones (as I would have been kidnapped). Government minders accompanied me throughout the trip and were present at almost every conversation. However, I am as certain as I can be that people told me the truth as they saw it. What follows is their story. In the paragraphs that follow I will tell the story as I heard it from dozens of residents — schoolteachers, shopkeepers, imams, priests, businessmen, doctors, university professors, students and jobless refugees who have fled to government-held areas from the surrounding countryside. When the Syrian uprising began in the early summer of 2011, Aleppo did not join it. There were a handful of demonstrations, but they were dealt with relatively gently. Some protestors were jailed, but there was no armed response as took place in some other parts of Syria. At the start of 2012, by which time much of Damascus was at war, the Aleppo business community says it was targeted by a series of assassinations and killings. Political and religious leaders say they were threatened with death or torture unless they went across to the rebels. “We knew we were being targeted,” said Fares Shehabi, head of Aleppo's Chamber of Industry. “We knew what was coming. We sent a message for the army to be sent to Aleppo.” The request was ignored. On 5 July that year an armed convoy — the Tawheed Brigade, an Islamist group that has previously praised Al-Nusra — rolled into ancient Aleppo. It dispersed and burned down police stations and set up roadblocks. Within a few weeks, the rebel brigades had taken over most of the city. “At first we thought they were Syrians,” said Shehabi. “But after a few weeks we got reports about foreigners, including fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Saudi, Iraq and Egypt.”Said Shehabi, “This was not regime change. This was invasion. And why was it taking a religious form? Why did it wear beards? We are not ready to replace a secular society with a religious one.” However, the newcomers established religious courts. Women were confined to their homes and made to cover up. Alcohol and smoking were banned. “I'm a Sunni, yet they still consider me to be an infidel,” Shehabi said. The Aleppo businessman argued that the paradigm of the Syrian conflict favoured by Western governments and the Western media is false. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has repeatedly portrayed the war as a murderous conflict waged by a fanatical minority loyal to Al-Assad against the overwhelming majority of the Syrian people, for example. Since the president belongs to the minority Alawite interpretation of Islam, this implies that the war is a sectarian conflict between supporters of the Alawite sect and the mass of Sunni Muslims. But Shehabi challenges this. He argues that the real divide is between a culture of religious tolerance, including moderate Sunnis like him, and the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam sponsored by Saudi Arabia. “This is not a war about President Al-Assad and his regime. I am not a member of the [ruling Syrian] Baath Party. This is a war about identity and lifestyle,” he said. For Shehabi and every other Aleppo resident I met, the war should be understood in a radically different way. They stress that in Aleppo there is a culture of tolerance and understanding embracing Christians, Shias, Alawites and ordinary Sunnis — an intermingling which has existed since time immemorial. Again and again, residents asked me why the British government and NATO were on the side of militant Islamism and terrorism. “Go to Idlib today,” Shehabi said of the northeastern city seized with the help of the Western-sponsored FSA forces last year. “It is like Kandahar [in Afghanistan]. How can you claim that you want to make Syria a democracy if you impose religious courts which do not recognise our religions or our ethnic variety?” he asked. Shehabi further asserts that he believes the insurgency in Aleppo was not part of a Syrian uprising but was instead deliberately supplied and orchestrated from Turkey. “The Turks gave them weapons,” he said. “They allowed fighters across the border. They nursed the wounded in their hospitals.” He claims that Turkey was motivated by economic gain, deliberately setting out to destroy Aleppo, which it saw as an economic rival. Shehabi says that he has cast-iron evidence that Turkish-backed fighters systematically stripped the production lines in Aleppo's industrial centre and shipped machinery back across the border. He complained about the stripping of Aleppo's factories shortly after the attacks began and, in his capacity as head of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry, issued writs against Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan for damages. He says that two weeks later the offices of the Chamber were completely destroyed in a massive bomb attack. DESTRUCTION OF ALEPPO: The demolition of Aleppo's industrial infrastructure is only part of the story. Before the revolution began it was a sophisticated city. There was a system of free public healthcare that offered a broad range of treatments for common diseases to more complex problems like cancer. I met Mohamed Al-Hazouri, head of the city's Department of Health, in his office at Aleppo's Razi Hospital. “In July 2012,” he told me, “terrorism hit the infrastructure of our health centres. They put six of our 16 hospitals out of service, as well as 100 of our 201 primary health centres and 12 of our 14 comprehensive centres. They also wiped out the ambulance service.” He gave the example of Aleppo's eye hospital. “It had been one of the biggest hospitals in the north of Syria, and it was turned by the rebels into a jail for detainees.” Al-Hazouri and his colleagues described their efforts to continue to provide a comprehensive service to the general population. Staff made heroic trips to rebel areas as part of their vaccination programme. “But they are humiliated. The insurgents say they are infidels, and they refuse to let them in.” As a result, diseases that had long been forgotten are now making a return. Al-Hazouri said that polio had been eradicated from Syria more than 10 years ago, but now there are cases in IS-occupied areas. Meanwhile, there is a chronic shortage of drugs and medical equipment. The school system has suffered comparable devastation. Ibrahim Maso, head of the education directorate in Aleppo, told me how his department had supervised 4,400 schools before the war, with 1.5 million students in the Greater Aleppo area. Some 3,000 of those schools are now under rebel control. “Only 915 schools are now teaching the government curriculum,” said Maso, who was an Arabic teacher for 17 years and school principal for a decade. He continues to pay the salaries of teachers stranded in rebel-held areas, even when they are prevented from teaching. I met one such teacher who had travelled from her IS-held village to the east of Aleppo to collect her 30,000 lira ($100) monthly salary. Before the war the journey would have taken less than an hour. Today, she has to spend five days traversing IS and Al-Nusra checkpoints to get to the education department in Aleppo. She was still wearing the black robes the IS group enforces on women. It confines all women to their homes unless they are completely covered in black, with not a centimetre of flesh showing. She told me how she had heard British and French accents among the IS fighters. She also said she had seen “very blond American and black ones speaking classical Arabic.” Often these fighters drive round the streets in Toyota pick-up trucks ordering people out of their houses to “come and see the punishments,” usually beheadings or a crucifixion. “Everything behind the curtains is allowed — sex, smoking and wine. Some women from our town go into their houses alone,” she said. She described how the IS fighters would knock on doors asking permission to marry the daughters of the families in the town. One man who refused was beheaded. The schools have been closed, but IS enforces its own education system. “Teenagers are taken to mosques for religious teaching. They brainwash the young men, telling them to attack their parents,” she said. Yet this brave and stoical teacher told me that she was not afraid because she was sustained by her own Islamic faith. “When you are with God you fear no one,” she said. She was preparing to make the journey back to rejoin her husband and children and spoke of her fears for the future. The Syrian army was approaching her town as it regained ground from IS across eastern Aleppo. “The IS fighters are preparing ambushes. They are moving their wives and families out. They are keeping us as human shields,” she said. The heroism of some of the people I met is almost beyond comprehension. One headmaster told me how he had tried to keep his school open in an IS area. He had been held in solitary confinement for 30 days in a cell with no toilet. Occasionally, he was beaten with an electric cable. A box full of scorpions was put into his cell. He was told, “This is the fate of every shahiba [government sympathiser]. You will be an example to everyone who works for the government.” The city of Aleppo traces its history back 7,000 years, and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. During that time it has endured countless catastrophes. It was sacked twice by the Mongols and once by the Central Asian emperor Timur, at the start of the 15th century. It has been destroyed by earthquakes. The events of the Syrian civil war are comparable in scale and horror to those past catastrophes. Of course, peace will be restored at some point and the city will be rebuilt. During the time I spent in Aleppo, the Syrian army was cutting off the routes between the Turkish border and the city. This means that the supply lines from Turkey to Al-Nusra and IS are no longer functioning. Slowly, as in Stalingrad in 1942, the besiegers are turning into the besieged. Edward Dark, an Aleppo-based journalist, tweeted last week, “This is the beginning of the end of the jihadi presence in Aleppo. After four years of war and terror, people can finally see the end in sight.” There was still stalemate in Aleppo as I drove out of the city recently, but in the countryside around it events are moving very fast. The writer was the British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013.
