Jan 26, 2015

The snow that blanketed Aleppo brought misery to its inhabitants. It was just one more unbearable burden added to the horror and toil of the war. A freak winter storm that hit the region claimed the lives of children in refugee camps in neighboring countries, but also some inside Syria itself, including the battered city of Aleppo. The reason was quite simple: There were no means of keeping warm, and what little there were, the average person could never hope to afford. Where once children were overjoyed when the rare snow fell so that they could skip school and go out and play, they now feared that very same snow could kill them.

Wrecked by relentless war, Aleppo is now also freezing, with no power, no water, no gasoline, no cooking gas and no heating. A city hit by those chronic shortages was in no shape to cope with such a fierce winter storm. As temperatures plummeted below freezing, schools, businesses and government offices shut down. The city came to an eerie standstill as people huddled together for warmth, wearing their heaviest winter clothes indoors. Frostbite, cold burns and vascular diseases became commonplace; the people’s spirit was broken, just like their city.

Electricity from the grid was something people had forgotten about months ago, and if it came on it was only for an hour or two a day. There was little firewood in the city as most of the trees had been cut down the previous winters for heating purposes, and no oil (mazot) was available for heating. Whatever little mazot there was, was either bought up by the businessmen who run the industrial power generators that sell electricity in limited hours and quantities to select neighborhoods at exorbitant prices or was being sold on the black market for four times its price. Only the very rich could afford it. The government was carefully rationing the small quantities it had left, to keep vital services such as communications, hospitals and water pumps running.

Water was also a problem. The main supply was restricted due to damaged pipelines and lack of power at the main pumping plant in the city; running water only came on two or three times a week. People had learned to cope by putting 1,000-2,000 liter (264-528 gallon] storage tanks on their roofs. When temperatures fell, the exposed pipes froze, or even broke.

The US-led coalition’s tactic of crippling the finances of the Islamic State (IS) by hitting the oil wells it controlled in the east of Syria had the devastating consequence of causing a severe shortage of petroleum and its refined products across the entire country. Oil production was completely in their hands, and whoever wanted, including the Syrian state, had to buy it off the IS via middlemen,