Bloodied Aleppo strives to heal wounds of Syria's old regime

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In many places, Aleppo feels alive two weeks after it was overrun by Syria's now-victorious rebels, marking the start of a campaign that took them all the way to Damascus and brought down the Assad regime.

In the Al Sabil district, fruit and vegetable stalls are bursting with fresh produce – ripe bananas, plump strawberries, and bulbous oranges. People throng the streets, and cars sit in traffic jams despite the fuel shortage – on the road to the Turkish border, petrol stations are either out of supplies or charging over a dollar per litre.

A fast-food restaurant pulses with the sounds of Spanish and English music, including a dance remix of Ruelle's Carry You. The old city souqs have been partially restored after years of destruction and damage caused by conflict and fires.

In his shop selling roasted mixed nuts, Ahmed Alwan says some of Aleppo’s services remain unreliable – water cuts out frequently, and electricity runs for just a few hours each day. "The state is new; they are repairing things," he says.

He stayed in the city throughout Bashar Al Assad’s rule. "Everything was constricting us," he adds. When asked what he wants the world to know about the city where he was born and raised, he grimaces and replies, "the regime’s oppression".

For eight years, 53-year-old Mohammad Hallak couldn’t speak his mind. “When you saw the shabiha – pro-regime thugs – or the regime soldiers behaving badly, we couldn’t say to them that they were in the wrong. We were under psychological pressure.”

He sympathised with the rebels, but stayed in Aleppo in December 2016, when the former Syrian president’s forces, with support from Iran-backed militias and Russian air power – took back Syria’s industrial capital from the opposition forces who had previously wrested the city from the government in Damascus.

“Where was I supposed to go? I had my work here, my wife and children, and my mother,” he told The National on a cold afternoon 10 days after Mr Al Assad fled the country he had ruled with an iron fist for over two decades. “I couldn’t leave.”

Significant physical destruction remains across the city from years of conflict. Mosques, heritage buildings and houses lie in ruins. More recent damage came from an air strike that hit outside a hospital as regime forces tried and failed to repel the rebel offensive.

'Overcome the tragedy'

Aleppo fell to the rebels led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) at the end of November. The campaign continued until Damascus was overrun and Mr Al Assad fled, ending more than five decades of dynastic, dictatorial rule in Syria.

HTS is made up mainly of groups from the extremist organisation Jabhat Al Nusra, which was linked to Al Qaeda. It cut ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, after a purge undertaken by the group's leader Ahmad Al Shara, formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al Jawlani.

Two weeks after the fierce battles in the north-western city, reminders of the old regime remain. Posters of Mr Al Assad and his father that once lined the city streets have been ripped down, strewn across the ground and defaced, with their faces torn out.

In the morgue at Aleppo’s abandoned military hospital, a bag of bloody organs lies discarded to one side, while bandages and military uniforms are scattered across the floor, the air heavy with the smell of death. A bloodstained plastic sheet still covers the stand where bodies were once washed before burial.

The traces of the past seem so fresh, the stench of decay so strong, it feels as though the building’s former staff and patients fled in a hurry. Two workers carry a small mountain of thousands of documents and patient records inside a wooden coffin en route to the hospital’s storage archive.

According to Amer, a member of HTS's medical services directorate currently guarding the hospital, regime soldiers were treated here – and many died here too, as is evidenced by the thick “martyrs’ record” book containing handwritten details of fallen soldiers. Members of Iran-backed militias were also treated at the hospital, Amer explains, referring to them as “intruders”. They were not identified by name in the hospital logbooks but recorded under the code “Sadiq”, the Arabic word for “friend”, signifying their alliance with the regime.

When opposition fighters arrived at the site in late November, they found no bodies, according to Amer. He estimates there was about half a day between the pro-Assad forces fleeing and the rebels taking control. “There was a period of chaos,” he says, pointing to the rooms where chairs lie overturned, piles of clothes are crumpled on the floor and an abandoned narghile pipe sits nearby.

At the back of one of the hospital buildings, a torn poster of Mr Al Assad and the former first lady Asma, smiling and greeting a mother and baby in a hospital bed, lies in a pile of rubbish. Around it are discarded military coats and half-eaten plates of food. The message on the poster reads: “Hand in hand, we will overcome the tragedy".