Children from Aleppo take part in local sports

[Anthea]

Everything we built for 20 years, gone in a blink – life in the ruins of Aleppo

A small group of boys play football, dodging tangled metal in the ruined ruined Umayyad mosque of Aleppo’s old city. When they were last able to come here, before the war, the vast courtyard’s patterned floor was beautifully polished, and the pile of bricks in a corner was a millennium-old minaret.

Now, the boys pick at the sandbags piled in its huge, fire-blackened arches. For them, this ancient place-of-worship-turned-fortress is a playground in a hellscape.

“It seems bigger now, maybe because I didn’t see it for such a long time,” says Yamin Saeed, a sweet-faced 14-year-old in a fake Armani jumper. Before the war, he and his friends were like children anywhere – they went to school, they loved Tom and Jerry – but the battle for Aleppo aged them overnight.

“I saw a human head once,” says Mohammed Sheni, who is also 14. “We were walking and then there was a rocket and people died. I’m trying to forget it, but you can’t forget something like that.”

It is a windy day. The boys walk home, steering clear of the narrow back streets to avoid dangling steel and falling concrete.

Amid a countrywide uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s government, rebels took control of Aleppo’s eastern half in 2012. In the following years, it was held by a mishmash of different groups, often at war with each other as well as with forces loyal to Assad.

In September 2015, pro-Assad Moscow launched airstrikes in Syria, starting in Homs and Hama, two cities north of Damascus. After that, Russian air power helped turn the tide against the various anti-government groups with a sustained bombing campaign on east Aleppo.

Walking in the city now, the toll exacted on its ancient streets by the war between pro-government forces, rebels and jihadis is evident, as is the human toll signified by the silence. Residents say they know the remains of their neighbours are still trapped under layers of rubble.

In December 2015, a truce allowed the evacuation of besieged citizens and, for a few days, the east was completely empty. But then people began to trickle back. Those remaining – who have nowhere else to go or feel pulled to their homes – go about their lives amid the profound destruction.

At the moment, that means just trying to survive. Everybody gets up and goes to bed with the sun because there is no electricity, and wears all their clothes at once to keep warm.

At 10am in al-Shaar, a neighbourhood ruined by years of bombing, men and women queue separately in the street by pots of steaming rice and chickpeas, clutching small plastic tubs, waiting for the representative of the charity handing food out to give them a few ladlefuls to feed their families for the day. When there was just one queue, explains the man doling it out, there was too much shoving. The women’s queue is four times as long as the men’s, which is really an old men’s queue – wrinkled faces under red and white keffiyehs. There are few young men left here.

By the end of the siege, only about 40,000 east Aleppians were still living there, of a pre-war population of about 1 million. Some moved to the west early on, or elsewhere in Syria, or left the country. Nobody knows how many were killed.

Turn down any street and one house might be a mess of metal rods and stone; the next still standing but inaccessible because the stairwell has been bombed; the next burned out and missing all its windows and doors.

The al-Bayan hospital has lost almost its entire facade: it looks like an open doll’s house. Brown armchairs sit in a waiting room, shelves are full of files.

The core of another building is still standing, but with no outer walls to support them, the floors flap down, trapping sofas and mattresses at odd angles. A dusty television stands on a sideboard on the third floor. A pink toilet with an apocalyptic view is visible on the fifth. People’s disfigured lives are on display.

But those people are almost all gone.

“This street used to be full. Now there’s only us and a couple of other families,” says Umm Ahmad. When I introduce myself to her in the deserted street, the first thing she says is: “My husband was killed over there.” Four years ago, he was hit leaving their mosque, which has a great hole in its dome. Ahmad lives with her father-in-law and her five children in a tiny flat that is more intact than most, but is missing windows and great chunks of the balcony.

We step over the pulverised remains of her neighbours’ flats and their contents, through her decorated, dented front door. She shows me into her lounge, UN tarpaulins pinned up to keep the weather out.

Umm Fardel, one her last friends in the neighbourhood, lost her house and everything she owned and laughs about her misfortune.

“Everything my husband and I built for 20 years, just gone in the blink of an eye,” she says, shaking with giggles on Umm Ahmad’s armchair. “Why should I be sad? I’m not the only one.”

“Someone stole my husband’s taxi, so now he’s always at home looking after me. I’m getting fatter and fatter,” she continues.

Umm Ahmad says: “We are laughing and crying at the same time.”

Her 20-year-old daughter, who is about to get married to a soldier in the Syrian army, hands round hot, spiced coffee in tiny ornamental cups. She does not mention it, of course, but this generosity comes at a cost: the water has to be fetched from tanks at the end of the street, and the fuel to boil it bought.

“Before, we pressed a button and we had hot water. I could wash my hair, just like that,” Fardel says.

As you drive from the east to the west side of Aleppo, past billboards of Assad and Putin wearing hard expressions, the universal destruction turns into a bustling, intact city. “Night and day” is how many describe the difference between the two sides.

In the west of what used to be Syria’s economic capital, hundreds of shoppers browse market stalls selling everything from marzipan fruits to towering glitter heels. Fairy lights adorn the trees outside bars and restaurants, where clients flirt, smoke their water pipes and order bottles of Jack Daniel’s. An orange tree stands, leaves glistening and branches full of fruit. In the war, most of the east’s trees were chopped down for firewood.

After the siege ended, the boys hanging around the Umayyad mosque went to look at the west. They found a city that had carried on without them.

“In east Aleppo, there was no meaning to life. In the west, they were alive. But now we’re trying to get our lives back,” Yamin says.

People living in the west are not without their problems, of course – water and electricity have to be purchased, and as the Syrian pound is at a fraction of its pre-war value, they can easily eat up a third of a salary.

At a packed bazaar in a once-plush, now tired hotel in west Aleppo, art teacher Obaida Qudsi gives visitors to his exhibition glow-in-the-dark stickers, so they can find their mobile phones in the middle of the night, when generators are off.

Qudsi proudly tells passersby that he is the maker of the world’s largest paperclip, unveiled at a Dubai shopping centre in 2004. In fact, his 3m paperclip was overtaken by a 9m Russian one in 2010. It is hard to imagine this kind of talk in the east, although it is less than two miles away.

Qudsi does not have to endure life in Aleppo: he has papers that mean he could go and live in the UAE. However, he says: “It’s my home, and if everyone goes, who will stay?”

Perhaps he would make a different choice if he lived in the east of the city.

Whether people say what they think or parrot government lines can be hard to judge. Journalists going into Assad’s Syria are assigned a government minder, who follows them around, listens to interviews and reports back to the ministry of information. Hearing what happened to others who opposed the government, it is hard to know how honest east Aleppians who live surrounded by army checkpoints and Assad’s face gazing down from posters can be about, say, whether they sympathised with the rebels, or what they think of the president.

Sometimes the propaganda is subtler.

A school has just opened amid the destruction. Children who have been hiding at home for years hare around its courtyard at break time. There is no water, so those who need the toilet leave the building, go down the street and disappear behind chunks of jagged concrete.

One teacher, Riham al-Hamoud, complains that there is too much variation in ability in her class of eight-year-olds. Many of the children in east Aleppo during the siege went to religious school or not at all, she says.

“The aggressive ones, and the ones that don’t want to learn, are those who were out of school for a long time,” she says, looking at the government minder behind me as she speaks. “They lived in war, they spent their lives watching clashes and seeing planes bombing. They didn’t have the chance to play.”

Hamoud’s first priority was to teach them the true colours of the Syrian flag. Then she tackled behaviour.

“They were very dirty in every way. They were throwing rubbish in the garden. I taught them not to,” she says. She puts this down to their parents, who she says were “affected by black-minded people”. This, “weapons carriers”, “the armed opposition” and simply “those people” are all phrases people use to refer to the rebel groups.

If anybody tries to talk about the horrors they experienced during the war, she says, she stops them.

“The children say: ‘Should I tell you what happened in the siege?’ And I say: ‘No, I’m not interested. Let’s talk about nice things.’”

Juman Makkie, head of the Orphaned Girl institution in west Aleppo, uses the same approach with her war-scarred wards: “We don’t open old stories with them. We have to close the curtain and not look back. It works 90% of the time. With the other 10%, we persevere so that they forget – or at least that they don’t mention it.”

Out loud, at least, a generation of Syrian children is learning to look forward, and not dwell on the past – even the past of only a few months ago. For most Syrians, the way you talk about the past could get you in trouble.

Most Aleppians have no idea what the future holds for them.

Umm Mohammed is relieved that her family managed to secure two rooms in the overflowing Jibrin refugee camp, where they plan to stay until they can work out what to do next.

Not everything in their future is on hold. The family’s 18-year-old second son got married two days earlier – to a 13-year-old girl, who stands awkwardly by her marital bed, a pile of shiny cream cushions and duvet on a mattress on the floor, looking fixedly at the mat.

“I cleared everyone out of this room for their wedding night,” Umm Mohammed says, taking her phone out and flipping through photos of the ceremony, which took place in the same room. In them, her child of a daughter-in-law poses in her bridal gown, her face white with makeup, pouting, her forearms resting on the wall of what used to be a workshop.

Asked why the couple married so young, Umm Mohammed says her firstborn son was murdered for being a government spy, and she is hoping there will soon be a new boy in the family.

As dusk approaches, Aleppo’s once-clear air is tinged yellow with the dust from fallen buildings.

In the east, it casts a haze over the Umayyad mosque. Even after Yamin and his friends have tramped home, Aleppians of all ages keep arriving. They have not come to pray: they are curious. They peer at the ornate tiles of a shrine, at the broken taps where worshippers would wash, at the polite pre-2011 notice to remove shoes, which is half shot off the wall.

In the west, drivers on their way home from work brush it from their windscreens rather than washing it off, to save water. The dust coats everything, east and west, uniting the two halves of the city.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ing-russia[url][/url]

[Anthea]

Eyes on Aleppo: Visual Evidence Analysis of Human Rights Violations Committed in Aleppo [July – Dec 2016]

On 28 March 2017 the Syrian Archive published a new report, Eyes on Aleppo: Visual evidence analysis of human rights violations committed in Aleppo [July – Dec 2016]. The report describes and investigates a new visual evidence dataset of 1748 videos of human rights violations in Aleppo city and the surrounding suburbs during the period of July – December 2016. A complete methodology of the report is available on the Syrian Archive website.

The following visual evidence dataset complements and supports recent efforts by different groups which have been assisted by the Syrian Archive to report human right violations in Aleppo between July and December 2016. Those efforts include:

UN Human Rights Council (Feb. 2017): “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic”
Atlantic Council (Feb. 2017): “Breaking Aleppo”
Human Rights Watch (Feb. 2017): “Coordinated Chemical Attacks on Aleppo”
Various investigations by (July 2016 – March 2017 ) Bellingcat.

While attacks and violations have been committed by all parties, including the International coalition and Turkish forces, visual evidence shows that the Syrian and Russian forces were responsible for the largest number of human rights violations in Aleppo city and its suburbs during the analyzed period. These violations include:

Attacks against hospitals, medical units, ambulances, schools, water stations, markets, mosques, bakeries and residential areas;
The use of illegal weapons such as incendiary weapons and chemical weapons against civilians;
Unlawful attacks on residential areas using cluster munitions;
Attacks against humanitarian aid workers and citizen journalists;
Attacks against women and children;
Forced displacement of civilians.

Below is a summary of report findings disaggregated by type of violations identified, specific munitions identified, and location of where videos were filmed.

Types of violations identified

An analysis of videos of violations disaggregated by the following types of violations:

Arbitrary and forced displacement;
Sieges and economic, social and cultural rights;
Specially protected persons and objects;
Unlawful attacks;
Use of illegal weapons;
Violation of children’s rights, and;
Other types of violations

A summary table of violations by type and date is provided below.



Arbitrary and forcible displacement were identified in eighteen (18) videos. A March 2017 report on the situation in Aleppo by the international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic found that “as warring parties agreed to the evacuation of eastern Aleppo for strategic reasons – and not for the security of civilians or imperative military necessity, which permit the displacement of thousands – the evacuation agreement amounts to the war crime of forced displacement.”

Sieges and economic, social, and cultural rights were identified in nineteen (19) videos. For the purposes of the report, the Syrian Archive defined sieges and violations of economic, social and cultural rights as incidents in which civilians are suffering from lack of basic necessary resources tied to the siege (e.g. difficulty in obtaining adequate food or water, or suffering as a result of lack of medical infrastructure). It also refers to incidents in which civilians suffered as a result of evacuation. Finally, it refers to incidents in which heritage and cultural sites were damaged or destroyed. It is recognised that many of these incidents also fall under the category specially protected persons and objects or other violation categories; however, in the report it refers only to those in which attacks are not directly filmed. Incidents in which attacks were directly documented have been categorised under alternate violation categories.

Due to siege of Aleppo city between July to December 2016, it was recognised that the figure representing violations may severely under represent the total number of siege related violations, as most videos of violations fall under the siege violation category. Here, these nineteen videos describe when the Syrian Archive was unable to attribute other-non-siege related violations.

Violations of specifically protected persons and objects were able to be identified in one hundred forty-seven (147) videos. The Syrian Archive used the customary international humanitarian law (IHL) definition of specially protected persons and objects, Rule 25-30 of which defines as hospitals, ambulances, and medical personnel. While these may be the object of attack when used for military purposes, prior warning is needed.

The display of an emblem to signify a location’s protected status is not required in conflicts where hospitals are deliberately targeted, and the treatment of wounded fighters does not render a hospital a valid military objective. Rule 38 ‘Attacks Against Cultural Property’ of customary IHL states that special care must be taken in military operations to avoid damage to buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, education or charitable purposes and historical monuments unless they are military objectives, and also that property of great importance to the cultural heritage of must not be the object of attack unless imperatively required by military necessity. Rule 27, 31, and 32 of IHL states that religious personnel exclusively assigned to religious duties must be respected and protected in all circumstances, though they lost their protection if they commit, outside of their humanitarian function, acts harmful to the enemy.

Unlawful attacks make up the bulk of violations identified in video footage, comprising 1,260 videos. IHL Rule 12 considers an attack unlawful if it “is not directed at a specific military objective, employs a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at specific military objectives, or employs a method or means of combat where the effects of which cannot be limited as required by IHL and as a result strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.”

Violations of the use of illegal weapons have been identified in two hundred and forty (240) videos. The March 2017 international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic states that Syria has ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013, following findings by the Organisation for the prohibition of Chemical Weapons that government forces had used chlorine bombs in an earlier phase in the conflict. IHL Rule 74 states that the use of chemical munitions are prohibited in both international and non-international conflicts. Rules 11, 12, and 71 of International Humanitarian Law state that the use of cluster weapons in densely-populated areas which are by their nature indiscriminate and whose effects cannot be limited is also prohibited. Further, IHL Rule 85 states that the anti-personnel use of incendiary weapons is prohibited unless it is not feasible to use a less harmful weapon.

Violations of children’s rights were identified in twenty-one (21) videos. The Syrian Archive categorised violations of children’s rights as videos depicting children injured, killed, or being treated in a hospital as a direct result of an attack. The total number of videos featuring violations of children’s rights is likely much higher, as, for the purpose of the report, only one category was applied and many may fall under the category of unlawful attacks.

Lastly, “Other” refers to videos that were filmed from far away and where the Syrian Archive was unable to determine whether a residential area was targeted. It refers also to videos where no voice was in the video mentioning, for example, the potential type of munition or perpetrator. Other also refers to videos showing attacks on a frontline in a residential area or attacks on legitimate military targets.

Please follow below to view the remainder of this honorific report:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/20 ... -dec-2016/

[Anthea]

New jihadist coalition launches powerful assault in West Aleppo

The new jihadist coalition, Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham, launched a new assault in the western sector of Aleppo City on Friday, targeting the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) positions near the Great Prophet Mosque in the Al-Zahra’a Association Quarter.

Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham reportedly began the assault by storming the western part of the Al-Zahra’a Association Quarter on Friday morning; this resulted in a series of intense clashes that are still ongoing.

According to a military source in Aleppo, the jihadist rebels are attempting to reestablish control over the mosque area and push east towards the Air Force Intelligence headquarters.

In the past, the jihadist rebels have launched similar attacks to capture this area; however, they have always been repelled after several hours of fighting with the Syrian Arab Army forces inside Al-Zahra’a.

[Anthea]

Talent show raises funds to support families in Aleppo

Last Saturday students, who are natives of Syria, hosted a talent show that was created to aid civilians trapped within the crisis in Aleppo, Syria. Currently, a six-year civil war has been taking place in Syria and more specifically in the city of Aleppo.

In 2011 mass protests began to form in the Syrian capital Damascus against President Bashar al-Assad and his government. Their goal was to enact political reform, improve civil rights, and to release political prisoners who were unjustly imprisoned. In 2012, Assad’s forces shot and bombed the demonstrators which then caused the Rebel groups to take Aleppo. Although the Rebel’s decision was not completely coordinated, they managed to take the east end of Aleppo while Assad and his government maintained control of the West. Civilians have been caught in the crossfire ever since the civil war began.

This is the first year the talent show was put on by Ghazal Shalabi, and several of her Syrian friends, who began planning and preparing for the talent show only two weeks before the event was held. Shalabi said that the faculty and staff were more than supportive with the students’ efforts. “President Wyatt supported our idea and encouraged us to do it.” Shalabi also mentioned that the Director of International Student Services, Erika Buckley helped them with whatever they needed.

The students started a Gofundme page which is where they received a substantial portion of their donations. They also set up a table right outside of the cafeteria in Stockdale where they also received a few donations, and could recruit performers as well. All the donations were sent to the Karam Foundation which is then sent to the people in Aleppo, Syria. In the end, the students managed to raise 2,000 dollars through their efforts. Shalabi says that, “$2,000 in Syria is a lot of money and can support a lot of families with their basic necessities.”

Among the students who helped coordinate the talent show, junior Iman AbdUlrazzak says that the students who performed reflected through song, poem, and rap what is going on in Syria and how everyone should all come together and help. “We became emotional when we heard the news about people being deported from their houses in Eastern Aleppo, and that is why we wanted to help.” AbdUlrazzak continued to say that the students who performed made him and his Syrian friends feel secure knowing that other people genuinely cared about the conflict occurring in Aleppo.

http://mccourier.com/2017/03/31/talent- ... in-aleppo/

[Anthea]

Children in a rebel-held Aleppo province town have been getting a taste of normal life thanks to an athletics competition.

Local reports said the events were organised by the Elite Sports Club in the northern Syrian town of al-Jeineh.

Some 200 children were due to compete over four days, with events such as sprints, hurdles and the long jump being held on makeshift courses.

phpBB [video]

Direct Link to Video:

https://youtu.be/XYM2gUbMrII

[Benny]

Nice link, thank you. How wonderful to see that the children get an oppurtunity to play and relax. No doubt they need it! Many thanks!

/B