In June 2011, the last time I was in Aleppo, I visited my grandmother’s home every day. I obsessively photographed the apartment where my father grew up and where I spent much of my youth. I snapped shots of her wooden doors and balcony, our family’s antiques arranged in the glass vitrine, her organized kitchen cabinets and my grandfather’s proud portrait in the dining room. I took only a few sentimental pieces with me when I left to go back to my home in America. I wish I had taken everything.
My grandmother’s apartment is on a tiny street tucked between parallel one-way boulevards, one traveling southeast toward the heart of old Aleppo, and the other running northwest to the city’s expansive outlying neighborhoods. This diverse part of the city, in the west, has largely avoided the destruction of the war swirling around it — so far.
Aleppo, where I spent my adolescent years, where I went to college and became an adult before returning to the United States, where I was born, has been split in two since 2012. The west side is in the clutches of the government, and the east is held by rebel forces. Over the last four years, brutal territorial battles tore through the city, dividing neighborhoods that had been interwoven for centuries. Some two million people (including thousands of displaced Syrians) live in relative safety in the west, while over 250,000 live in the east, which has been subjected to years of indiscriminate aerial bombardment by the government’s barrel bombs and, since last year, Russian airstrikes.
Aleppo is the last major city where the rebels control significant territory, and President Bashar al-Assad thinks that capturing it could bring him close to so-called victory. In July, his forces tightened the noose around eastern Aleppo to wage yet another brutal “kneel or starve” campaign. Supplies of food and medicine were choked off; hundreds of civilians died.
At the beginning of August, the power struggle on the ground shifted unexpectedly. Activists set thousands of tires alight, creating huge clouds of black smoke, a weak attempt at a homemade no-fly zone to hide the east side from Russian airplanes. The rebel groups forged a fragile coalition and joined forces with the Levant Conquest Front, an Islamist group that recently was called the Nusra Front and was previously Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Together, they battled Mr. Assad’s troops and their Hezbollah militia allies. On Aug. 6, they broke the siege. Trucks from nearby Idlib brought the trapped civilians fresh food for the first time in weeks. Meanwhile, Russian jets struck nearby towns with incendiary bombs in retaliation. The bodies of fighters piled up in trucks like dead cattle.
As the battle unfolded, analysts on social media discussed events in real time with a zeal that comes only with detachment. Some said this battle would (again) tip the scales of the war. Others claimed that the rebels’ victory meant the bloody end was (again) near.
A favorite tool of the dispassionate Syria analyst is a map: red and green blobs showing a shifting front line, which streets are held by rebels and which by the government. These wretched maps rudely superimpose their lines over the landmarks of my life: On the east are the people I grew to love through the revolution, men, women and children who defied all odds and stood chanting in the face of one of the most ruthless regimes in history. On the west are my streets, my school, my university, my home.
I study these maps and calculate how far my home sits from the moving front line. As my neighborhood shifts sides from west to east, from red to green, will it be the next target of Mr. Assad’s barrel bombs? Or will it be left to the mercy of the rebels, who promised not to loot or destroy private property or kill civilians? Why should my home be spared when millions of others’ weren’t? This is what it feels like to watch your city rip itself apart: a constant oscillation between guilt and relief, fear and pride.
On the guide, the flaw line inches toward the Hamdaniyeh, the western door into the city, which is the area of my closest companion's home. I remained with her on her on the overhang in 2011, looking over her mom's careful patio nurseries loaded with blossoming trees, statues and wellsprings. The hot evening wind from the west was solid that day and conveyed the fragrance of jasmine. She said her dad had advised her to say farewell to this spot. I protected my tearing eyes from the sun, the wind and my companion. I didn't trust her. I put stock in the unrest that would allow everybody to achieve their potential — not only those of us who had lived in a rise of benefit — and for opportunity, respect and an existence without apprehension that Syrians had been denied for a considerable length of time.
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I didn't photo our own particular home the way I did my grandmother's. And, after its all said and done, notwithstanding when the war was still a long way from Aleppo, I expected that to do as such would be to concede the incomprehensible: I could stay away for the indefinite future. From that point forward, my undocumented home has been attacked and plundered by security strengths. Return appears as incomprehensible as rewinding time.
The battling in Aleppo proceeds. The guide could move again if the radicals cut off administration held parts of the city, the attacked be attacking. As instability weaving machines, aggregate memory — the establishment of each Aleppian's character — remains. We are unequipped for overlooking the past. We can't delete the memory of our Umayyad Mosque's shelled minaret, our Queiq River where bloated, tormented bodies were dumped by security drives and angled out by the casualties' families; our seared bazaars and antiquated structures decreased to rubble. We will always remember what Aleppo resembled there was a west or east side, before there were attacks and barrel bombs, before there was a solitary displaced person.
Since March 2011, the meaning of "triumph" has moved for Syrians. For the powers battling on the ground, triumph is pursued in fights for area, inch by inch, checkpoint by checkpoint, continually drawing new maps, and leaving devastation in their fallout. For the world forces, triumph is containing and fighting the terrorist radicals inside Syria's fringes and neglecting other people.
For Syrians like me, who put stock in an equitable insurgency, who needed a conclusion to the onerous Assad administration, the significance of triumph has changed. Triumph now incorporates things we had never envisioned five years prior: to not grieve the passing of yet another companion; to take a Syrian homeless person tyke off a Turkish, Lebanese or Jordanian road and send her back to class; to end the constrained starvation of Syrians living under attack; to pull for our Olympic swimmer who swam over the Aegean and now contends not as a Syrian but rather as an evacuee. Triumph will be the point at which we weld Syria's broken guide together and our nation gets to be conspicuous once more.
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