What is Aleppo?

Like the nation to which it belongs, Halab, the Arabic name for Aleppo, conjures images of a decaying old world metropolis, trapped in the shadow of bygone glory days. Under the unrelenting grip of a distinctively Arab dictator and the cruel legacy of colonialism, its name, its influence, and its story have faded into a forgotten corner of history. Its fate is not exceptional though — the Middle East is haunted by the ghosts of once imposing ancient cities, victims of the slow, drawn out decay of time and neglect or the sudden and complete destruction of war. The terrors engulfing Halab today are old acquaintances of the Levant.

Though the World’s reintroduction to this enduring city is the regrettable result of its role as epicenter of the Syrian Civil War and the ensuing refugee crisis, Halab’s historical importance transcends its contemporary, Assad-era story. This city sprung out of a unique intermingling of cultures and commerce: the intersection of Egyptian and Hittite trade routes, the center of Alexander’s Hellenic conquest of the East, a key hub along the Silk Road, the birthplace of Popes of Rome, ancient Christendom’s first great loss to ascendant Islam, and where the learned scholars of Islam infused Rumi with the jurisprudence that informed his timeless poetry. As one of human civilization’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, with first settlements dating back more than 8,000 years, Halab, and the few remaining ancient cities like it, represent the physical history of mankind and the indisputable evidence of our existence and evolution as a culture.

The Brat Takes on Isis

Though I had visited Halab several times before the war, we were reacquainted on the rocky shores of Lesvos in February 2016. By then, the Syrian Civil War was in full gear and hundreds of thousands of refugees were embarking on the perilous journey from the Turkish coast in ill-equipped dinghies, praying for a safe landing on the Greek island’s impassable shores in search for sanctuary in Europe. As the migrations escalated, rag tag groups of volunteers from around the World descended onto the island, staffing a volunteer-led relief effort singular in its mission and unique in its existence.

Refugees often make the dangerous 7 km journey from the Turkish coast in overcrowded black rubber dinghies.

I planned to visit a friend who was volunteering on the island during a short stop-over before continuing on to Lebanon where I would spend the remainder of the month with family. My superficial understanding of the refugee crisis from news reports and podcasts scarcely prepared me for what I was about to witness. I would spend my first few days meeting volunteers, visiting a home for unaccompanied minors, touring a makeshift overflow shelter called Better Days for Moria, and chopping up the remains of deflated black rubber dinghies tangled up on the stunning shores of the northern coast like an oil spill. The scarcity of Arabic-speaking volunteers was troubling, though understandable as this was the doorstep of Europe.

One day while driving to the home for unaccompanied minors, my friend relayed a story about an eight year old Syrian boy, Ali, who was at the home with his older, but still young, twelve year old brother, Moussa. Ali was a troublemaker, picking unwinnable fights with the older Pakistani and Afghan boys, from which the hapless Moussa was charged to defend him. Ali was not cooperative with any of the custodians. He was, to put it mildly, a brat.

We parked outside of the home’s iron gates and walked up the long pathway through an unassuming garden to two large wooden doors. The caretaker let us in and directed us into a large game room where one promptly notices the light-blue hue of the walls, which are painted floor-to-ceiling with an assortment of Western superheroes — Superman, Spiderman, and other heroes whom these kids could desperately use in their lives. The children were seated around a long dinner table in the back; all of the children, that is, except for one young boy.

Superheroes painted on the walls inspire the children at the home for unaccompanied minors.

Ali, a scrawny boy of light brown complexion and short overly gelled hair, was sitting at the computer playing a first-person shooter in his cool leather jacket. It was not a particularly unusual sight for a boy his age but one could scarcely neglect feeling the weight of his misfortune when juxtaposing the virtual warfare playing on the screen against the real warfare that led to his confinement within this refuge for the vulnerable.

But for one uninterested translator distracted by the relentless ding of incoming Whatsapp messages, there were no adult Arabic speakers. The caretaker, Nicole, a Greek lady barely out of law school, spoke English fluently, but Ali and Moussa did not. It was a sight to behold, Ali yelling for a banana in Arabic and Nicole responding in English with demands that he get off the computer. Neither really understood what the other was saying, but the familiarity of the exchange — a boy asking his mother for food and a mother demanding he get off the computer — transcended language barriers.

Our time at the home was brief, but we managed to entertain the kids with a crude game of volleyball. Ali stayed on the computer, his fervent refusal to join the game was betrayed by a quivering voice that hinted at a desire for belonging. After some nudging in a tone doubtlessly familiar to Ali from his uncles or his father, he reluctantly agreed to participate on his own terms, by kicking the ball and nearly destroying the game room. Surely this was progress. The Arab-Afghan/Pakistani mortal rivalry eventually vanished, replaced with the camaraderie of teammates, cooperating in a collective effort to defeat their opponents.

After the game, the children prepared for bed. For Ali, this night time ritual was usually the cause of nightmares for the custodians but tonight, it was seamless. His demeanor seemed different now. We ended the evening in the dormitory with Ali and Moussa in bed but not yet ready to sleep as they excitedly shared stories, as kids often do, but theirs were not about playground dramas or mean teachers. Theirs were stories about the harrowing journey that led them to this place. It all started on the road to Halab.

As Ali and Moussa explained, their parents, fearing for their children’s lives and future in Dar’a in southern Syria, made the impossible decision to entrust their care to a human smuggler who would deliver them to their uncle in Germany. I strained to contain my contempt, wondering how right-minded parents could send their young children with a human smuggler through a country engulfed in a civil war that has claimed half a million lives and leveled entire cities, across the watery graveyard of the Aegean Sea, and through the hostile land crossings of southeastern Europe defended by rusty barbed wire fences and freely swinging police batons. My disdain was certainly not uncommon; many of us are quick to judge parents for the difficult decisions that they make under conditions that are unfathomable to us. I wondered whether I would make the same choice if my young children had been out of school for five years, inching deeper each day into a bleak future, exposed to the relentless psychological traumas of a war with no end in sight, and whose lives could be ended at any moment by regime thugs, unprincipled revolutionaries, or common criminals.

Ali and Moussa boarded a Volkswagen microbus overflowing with like-minded asylees, bound northward towards Sueida, the homeland of Syria’s Druze. Here the children would face the first of many perils along their expedition, instantly catapulting them into maturity. According to the kids, local villagers in Sueida robbed the hapless fugitives of their valuables with threats to report them to the Assad security forces. The kids lost their money and their phones, their only lifeline to their family. With a shrewdness developed over years of hardship, Ali and Moussa survived the incident and managed to contact their uncle in Germany to send them more cash by Western Union. And so their adventure began.

The group continued northward towards the Idlib countryside, where they would face their gravest threat: ISIS patrolled these areas. The bus would make its clandestine crossing through the desert before dawn, with nothing but the moon and the star light to guide its path. Ali excitedly described a cramped bus, its frame rattling uncontrollably as it races through the tranquil desert, the passenger compartment nearly coming apart from the chassis upon every hill that it was not designed to pass at these speeds. Only the occasional glow of cell phone screens and cigarette cherries illuminated in the endless blackness, but the driver did not need any lights. He’s made a living crossing this desert over the last five years.

The passengers sat silently, scarcely holding on to their sanity as they brooded over the menace that might be lurking in the darkness outside. Ali and Moussa, and everyone else on the bus, had seen the videos. They knew what atrocities awaited prisoners of ISIS. Then the blinding lights pierced the darkness through the rear window, interrupting the uneasy quiet. It was an ISIS patrol according to the driver who quickly recognized the Toyota Hillux, a favorite of the terrorist group. I could no longer contain my apprehension and instinctively gasped. The kids, taking note of my anxiety, quickly reassured me that the patrol only asked the bus to turn back. They had lived the experience and here they were describing it with the cold indifference of a battle-hardened marine, while I sat with my hands covering my mouth, struggling to contain my grief with every word they uttered. It does not require a writer’s imagination to conceive of how this scenario could have ended much worse for them.

With the same boundless courage that would carry them onward to Europe, the caravan attempted the crossing again the very next night. And there it was at long last, the sign welcoming them to Aleppo Governorate, the final stretch before freedom from this wretched place. They had finally made it.

After leaving the home, my disdain turned inward for having prejudged Ali. What I, and the custodians at the home, didn’t fully understand was that it is impossible for those of us who have not suffered this sort of trauma to comprehend the state of mind of an eight year old boy who has grown up knowing nothing but violence and insecurity. Ali and Moussa were children in the midst of a lonely and perilous journey, without their parents, without even the soothing tone of a familiar voice or language to comfort them. Ali’s unruly behavior was the consequence of a child’s desperate need to hear the reassuring voice of his father or his mother, but in these desperate circumstances, any Arab voice would do. Childhood may be lost to those who grow up in war, but they do not cease to be children.

Save the Nikes

My decision to stay in Lesvos, to my family’s great displeasure, was inevitable. With nothing but a small carry-on bag containing a pair of jeans, two shirts, and a jacket, I changed my plans and joined the relief effort.

CK Team at the Korakas lighthouse.

I joined Camp Korakas Team (or CK Team) named after the historic lighthouse in its designated zone of responsibility in the northern part of the island. The lighthouse at Korakas was built in 1863 and, while the lighthouse tower still beams its warning to seafarers, the stone structures surrounding it have fallen into disrepair. Skilled volunteers undertook crude repairs, careful not to disturb the historical edifice, to produce a makeshift shelter for volunteers and arriving refugees. Today, more than 150 years after it was first built, the lighthouse stands as a beacon of hope to which the captain-less dinghies are guided as they traverse the night time waters of the Aegean Sea, but which experienced seafarers recognize as a warning of treacherous waters to be avoided at all costs.

The stone structures around the lighthouse are used as a temporary shelter for arriving refugees.

CK Team’s role was to camp out on the beaches, carefully scan the waters, and call for rescue boats to intercept the rubber dinghies before they reached the hazardous and rocky coast. Oftentimes, the screams of panicked passengers would alert the volunteers to the dinghies crash landing into the jagged rocks. The volunteers would leap into action to safely unload passengers, provide first aid, and arrange for transportation to the camps.

Scanning the waters at the Korakas lighthouse. Photo credit: Morag MacDonald.

During my second to last night shift at Korakas, we were jolted awake by the penetrating cries coming from beneath the cliff at the edge of the lighthouse. Volunteers executed the well-rehearsed rescue plan. Designated rescuers raced down the cliff and into the icy water to stabilize the wooden or fiberglass boat and to unload the passengers. The nurse and doctor on duty prepared to quickly evaluate each passenger with a keen eye for the most common ailments — hypothermia, frostbite, hypoglycemia, soft tissue injuries, and bone fractures. My partner and I turned on the diesel generator, ignited the electric heaters in the lighthouse structures, clumsily lit a barrel fire outside to provide additional heating for this larger than average-sized group, and began to arrange for ground transportation to the camps.

The water was especially cold that night and the bitter winds struck relentlessly. The volunteers quickly led the disembarking passengers up the makeshift steps that CK Team had built into the cliff walls and into the stone structures where they might find respite from the uncompromising environment. Medical volunteers directed the children into a separate room (with a parent) to outfit them with an emergency Mylar blanket under their cold wet clothing. Children are more susceptible to hypothermia because of their bodies’ large surface area but supplies are limited in this provisional refuge and only the most severe cases are treated here.

CK Team installed rudimentary steps up the steep cliff to the lighthouse.

These passengers happened to be from Afghanistan, except for one young Halabi man, who I’ll call Ahmad. He wore a sullen visage and what appeared to be a glass eye, and clutched a pair of pearly white sneakers tightly against his chest. As the medics led the single file into the makeshift shelter, he turned to me with a loud and familiar greeting. I did not know this person but did he somehow know me? The quick realization that I only resembled someone he knew from back home produced no hesitation in his demeanor and he leaned in with the loving embrace of a long lost friend. To this person, an impossible journey had finally come to an end and he wanted to share his relief and his joy with a friend. The familiarity of my look, my voice, and my language would do at this moment. I cannot begin to compare our struggles, but I found the same relief in the human connection that brought him a modicum of comfort in that instance.

I would learn later that he had spent the last several weeks with this group of Afghans waiting for their smuggler to call on them the instant their boat was to depart from the Turkish coast. He had grown restless and detached, unable to communicate with or relate to the Farsi and Pashto speakers that surrounded him. He was alone and had been alone ever since leaving Halab a couple of months before, where he was in his second year of law school. The deteriorating security situation forced his departure. As he explained it, the regime and the myriad of rebel groups have always targeted young men in a desperate search for cannon fodder. The few men who had not yet chosen a side were under growing threat as manpower was in short supply after five years of heavy fighting. With little planning, he packed up a small suitcase with his most valuable belongings and left for Turkey, hoping, like more than a million before him, to find refuge in Europe.

When the night finally came, the smuggler led Ahmad and the Afghans deep into the woods that lined the coast and the group strained in the darkness to haul their luggage and young children over the uneven terrain as the use of lights was prohibited for fear of exposing their location to the oppressive and ever-vigilant Turkish police. A sturdy-looking boat awaited them on a secluded part of the rocky shore — soon they would be in Europe, they thought. The absence of promised life jackets foretold of the sinister odyssey that awaited them just beyond. But this didn’t matter. After all, what Ahmad and the other would-be seafarers did not know was that a large proportion of the life jackets provided by the smugglers were fake, filled with a paper material that absorbs water and pulls the wearer deeper into the shadowy abyss below. There was no time for equivocation now as the smugglers forcibly corralled the group onto the boat and directed them, most of whom had never been near the open seas before, to steer towards that dim blinking light on the horizon. That light was the Korakas lighthouse about seven kilometers away.

The troubles started not long after. The boat swayed side to side as the terrible waves crashed against the frame, drenching the passengers and slowly filling the hull with water. They seemed to stand still against the heavy winds despite the full throttle of the engine. They were carrying too much weight but what ballast was there except for their bodies and the few valuables they carried? The supposedly 30 minute jaunt — which in reality takes four hours under the best of conditions — was now six hours deep and they were still too far away from the lighthouse. The engine had already shut off several times, stranding them in the middle of this wretched graveyard, before firing back up by the grace of God. How many thousands had drowned making this very journey before them? They were cold and wet in this overloaded coffin and the sounds of children crying and women wailing were muted only by the piercing winds.

The tangled remains of rubber dinghies along the beaches of northern Lesvos. The rocky coast is a hazard to the incoming boats. Photo credit: Morag MacDonald.

They made it to within 100 meters of the lighthouse before the boat ran out of gas and the engine shut down for the last time. The boat had been accumulating icy water for the last eight hours and, without the thrust of an engine, they could only pray that the waves and the wind would propel them towards their ultimate destination. Though they were so close now, the dangers persisted. A woefully overcrowded boat 100 meters offshore, marooned in this vast black space, battered by uncompromising waves, and without life vests — thousands have met their end under similar conditions.

They had no choice but to toss all of their bags and suitcases overboard. Everything. Most of them only had their most precious belongings on board, having lost everything else somewhere along their long arduous journeys. Those who had packed their cash, passports, or jewelry in their bags were out of luck. Everything was to be tossed overboard immediately — their time was running out. Ahmad refused to toss the one small bag that he carried. He just couldn’t. Fellow passengers would have none of it and snatched his bag to lob it themselves. Ahmad managed to grab one thing before it sunk into the violent depths — his Nikes, the same Nikes that he now clutched so tightly against his chest as he retold this chilling tale. This was the last remaining artifact of Ahmad’s old life and I understood now why he was so wanting for a bit of comfort. The beaches of Lesvos are littered with the remains of past lives discarded under similar circumstances.

It was now time to leave the Korakas camp and walk 0.8 km up the hill from the lighthouse to Point 8, a sturdy frame tent graciously donated by Médecins Sans Frontières. From here, buses and pickup trucks would transport them to more permanent shelters elsewhere on the island, where they would receive dry clothing, food and water, and instructions for the next stage of their long remaining journey. Before CK Team and other NGOs arrived, weary refugees would walk for as long as ten hours to the official refugee camps on the island’s capital of Mitilini, or would receive extortive rides from the local mafia in exchange for what little of value they had left.

The uphill walk was of medium difficulty but jagged rocks that could pierce skin covered the muddy path. As we began directing the cold and tired refugees up the hill, I looked back to see Ahmad arguing with the nurse, who was to sweep behind the group to ensure everyone’s safe arrival to Point 8. I ran down to find out that Ahmad was refusing to wear his Nikes despite the nurse explaining that the sharp rocks would tear up his feet if he hiked barefoot. In Ahmad’s mind, these Nikes were too valuable to wear in the mud. After some hyperbolic pleading and a kiss on the forehead, an ordinary means of persuasion among Arabs, Ahmad reluctantly agreed to wear his shoes for this part of the passage conditional on a promise that he could clean them on the other side. And so we marched up the murky hill to catch up with the rest of the group. At Point 8, Ahmad and I shared more stories over cigarettes before he finally departed on one of the pickup trucks. Though we had only just met, our deep kinship was rooted in a common past even though our present diverged so greatly. I cannot say what ended up happening to him — we encountered many hundreds of refugees that month — and this uncertainty is a persistent and tormenting reminder of my time in Greece.

The sun sets over the remains of a boat that once carried more than 50 refugees to the Korakas lighthouse.

Before the War

Despite the bleak circumstance today, my memory of Halab will endure in beautiful encounters from long before the war began. I first came upon Halab in the early 1990s, during my family’s fleeting return to Lebanon from the United States, where we had found asylum from the recently ended Lebanese Civil War. That war was itself a result of unresolved societal tensions that heralded the horrors consuming the country’s larger neighbor today. It was easier to fly into Damascus International Airport at the time and my mother’s Syrian family received us warmly. Relatives from Halab congregated to greet us with that familiar brand of hospitality, expressed through the unremitting love of family and good food, and durable enough to avoid being undermined by the “too-busyness” of the modern age or even a civil war. I would come to appreciate this dependable kindness more with each subsequent visit as modernity began to envelope my own life and I became “too busy” for old world niceties. It was also during this trip that I finally learned the meaning of the word that seemed to prefix the names of so many foods I grew up eating, from za’tar halabi to fisto’ halabi. It is fitting that the legacy of an Eastern Mediterranean cultural capital would survive in the region’s culinary language.

We would visit Halab several more times during the six years that my family lived in the Al-Mina district of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city near the border with Syria, with whom a large proportion of people have family connections. Tripoli is more than ninety percent Muslim but most of our neighbors, including my mother’s family, were Greek Orthodox Christians. I always attributed the extensive familial connections between Al-Mina and Syria to geographic proximity and, at my young age, the different faith that we belonged to was only a trivial curiosity. As it turns out, Al-Mina is the home of Christian refugees from Greece, Turkey, and Syria, who fled the Ottoman persecution of the early 20th century, the same persecution that claimed the lives of more than a million Armenians in a genocide long forgotten by all but a few students of history and the Armenians themselves. My maternal grandfather’s quest for refuge from the Young Turks would take him from Antakya through Halab and Homs, where he met and married my grandmother, before finally settling in Al-Mina. Our family history is not unique — the story of genocide, collective violence, and mass migration permeates the histories of most families in this part of the World. Today’s Halabis are only its latest victims.

Merchants and Masters

I was fortunate to visit Halab one last time as an adult in 2007, during a business trip with my father. The four hour journey by bus from Damascus to Halab took us through the desert of northern Syria. The bus was large, air conditioned, and quite comfortable, not unlike the D.C.-New York buses that I often ride. A Western movie played on the communal screens but my attention was captivated by the landscape outside in all of its barren beauty. This desert was the refuge that my father’s Ghassanid ancestors traversed nearly 1,800 years ago when the destruction of the Marib Dam drove them from their villages in Yemen deep into the unforgiving Arabian Peninsula to settle in northern Syria. I wondered also if this was the final resting place of thousands of young Ghassanid men who fell as Christianity’s vanguards against the rising Islamic Empire and whose families were thus condemned to the austere mountains of Lebanon in a renewed search for sanctuary. Many of their descendants, including my father’s family, have lived there ever since. These battles changed the course of world events as Islam would eventually find its way to the doorsteps of Europe just a few centuries later. History certainly lives in this desert.

We finally arrived in Halab in the early afternoon and were greeted by the familiar chaos of any large city — this could be Cairo or Bangkok. After a long drive through the still desert, one’s senses are stunned by the cacophony of car and motorcycle engines as drivers skillfully navigate congested streets with nothing but their horns and a few traffic rules to guide them and the obscene smell of exhaust and cigarettes occasionally interrupted by the delightful smell of Syrian cuisine that emanates from restaurants that line the streets. But this is where the similarities ended. I was struck by the extraordinary cleanliness as I walked through the Al-Madina Souq, where the city’s dignified mercantile heritage was on full display by its spice merchants, butchers, and textile vendors. The offerings were as diverse in their origin as anything I had ever seen and aroused every sense, from the pleasant aroma of Indian spices, to the radiant patterns adorning Iranian silks, and the sharp flavor of Chinese ginger. This ancient souq had changed little since its construction in the 14th century and it was this enduring authenticity that transported me to a different era, when commerce was still the craft of courageous adventurers, charting course for strange places in search of valuable goods to earn a profit. As I reminisce over the beautiful memories of me and my father wandering the souq’s famous narrow, covered alleys, the realization that today it lies in ruins evokes in me a painful sorrow and a reminder that the memories and relics of humanity’s shared past are fragile and must be proactively protected.

After leaving the market, we drove to meet with a Yazidi jeweler who was doing some work for my father and whose name I cannot recall. Syrian jewelers are renowned in the region for having retained the ability to craft 22-karat gold, a skill lost to most goldsmiths today. The man led us through his home, taking care that we avoid the wing of the house where the women lived. The diversity of the place was striking. Here was an ultra-conservative family, for whom the mere gaze of a strange man was prohibited to the household’s women, living down the street from my mother’s family, who spent weekends at the beaches in Tartous sunbathing in cheeky bikinis.

At the rear of the apartment, we entered a small room that could only be described as ancient. An assortment of the master’s tools — hammers, pliers, cutters, magnifiers, and what appeared to be half-finished works in progress — were scattered upon the large uneven wooden table that occupied most of the space. The subtle but pungent smell of gas that had made its way from the leaky torches filled the air. Like the arcane skill itself, this prehistoric laboratory was bequeathed from father to son over countless generations, and automation and high-tech machinery had no place here. High purity gold is exceedingly malleable and difficult to fashion into the intricate shapes popular among the Arabs, whose tastes favor the granule bunches, spiral wires, festoon patterns, and delicate bezels of antiquity. Such artistry requires the gentle touch of a craftsman whose expertise is the culmination of generations of masters before him, including, perhaps, the masters of Roman Syria itself. This was not only a workshop, it was a museum where a craft as ancient as human civilization was preserved in all of its brilliance. After conducting our business over a cup of sweet Syrian tea, in the tradition of many thousands of foreign merchants before us, we left the jeweler’s home bound for the bus station to catch the last bus to Homs. That was the last time that I would see Halab in all of its wonderful chaos.

My memories of the city remain of a bustling commercial center, inheriting its distinctive character from its Silk Road forefathers. We often hear places in the Near East described as crossroads of “East” and “West”, but isn’t such a designation trite in our interconnected and rapidly modernizing world, where cities retain little of their ancient character? Halab may no longer be a crossroads, but the legacy of its former life was preserved in its diverse souqs, its vociferous merchants, its talented craftsman, and its industrious people. While the world around it marched into modernity, the city, having discovered globalization millennia earlier, disconnected and retained its authenticity.

A Story Retold

Each victim of the Syria conflict bears the weight of their own story and these stories are too numerous to re-tell in one essay. It is difficult to imagine the impact on the collective psyche of these experiences, whose shockwaves reverberate farther and deeper than the lives directly impacted. The story of the Levant is one of struggle, reconstruction, and perseverance. Levantines are close enough to bear witness to the prosperity of the West, reaped in part at their expense during the humiliating legacy of colonization, a legacy whose expenses they continue to pay in the form of weak institutions, weak governance, authoritarian strongmen, and violence, but too close also to their troubled past to escape the self-imposed prison it fashions.

Before documenting my stories here, I did not appreciate the extent to which the strong pull of Halab’s gravity had influenced the trajectory of my own life. As I reflect on these memories, I realize that these are the same tales told by my parents who endured the Lebanese Civil War and my grandparents who endured the Ottoman persecutions before them. While the actors change, the plot persists, and the stories that always cast a troubling shadow over my own upbringing, and the upbringing of many like me, simply repeat in their own modern incarnation.