Bashar al-Assad’s face has been ripped away from posters at the abandoned checkpoint that separates Sheikh Maqsoud, a neighbourhood in the north of Aleppo, from the rest of the city. No cars dare use the wide boulevard any more because the road is still watched by Kurdish snipers allied to the regime. The units retreated into the warren of bombed and burnt-out buildings when Islamist rebel groups launched an unprecedented attack on the city at the end of November, triggering a chain reaction that led to the swift collapse of the Assad dynasty.
Civilians hurry past, some with small children in pushchairs, others rolling cooking gas canisters down the road, all trying not to attract undue attention. A man had been shot and killed here the night before, picked off from the upper floor of a windowless apartment block. Aleppo fell to an umbrella of Sunni Arab factions led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) three weeks ago, but the Kurdish units stationed in Sheikh Maqsoud refused to surrender when HTS came in, afraid of what would happen if they surrendered. Now, they appear to be waiting for something to shift in Syria’s new and fragile status quo.
But a decade on from the Guardian’s last visit, during the four-year-long battle for Aleppo between the Assad regime and rebel forces, it is clear that Syria’s vicious civil war has ripped it apart, tearing at the social fabric and wreaking physical destruction that cannot easily be mended. At least 30,000 people were killed here, hundreds of thousands more lives ruined, and centuries’ worth of priceless human heritage has been destroyed for ever.
Aleppo quickly became one of the most dangerous places on Earth: jihadist groups infiltrated what began as a nationalist uprising, turning it into an ideological battle with seismic impact both inside and outside Syria’s borders. Vladimir Putin intervened in the war on Assad’s behalf in 2015, turning the tide, adding Russian airpower to the Syrian barrel bombs dropped on east Aleppo’s hospitals and White Helmet rescue workers.