Читать книгу Erdogan Rising - Hannah Lucinda Smith - Страница 15

The Syrian rebels had captured two main border crossings with Turkey, Bab al-Salaam (the Peace Door) and Bab al-Hawa (the Windy Door), and the Turkish government kept them open allowing rebels, refugees and journalists to cross in and out of rebel-held Syria. What had once been sleepy frontier outposts frequented by intrepid backpackers and cross-border traders were now funnels for weapons, aid and desperate people. My Syrian fixer, who had picked me up the night before and run through the basic logistics of the route into the war zone, left me at the first Turkish checkpoint at Bab al-Salaam, telling me that he would pick me up on the other side. With no passport, he had to travel into Syria via one of the smuggling routes a few hundred metres along the border. It was discombobulating enough to be left alone among the crowds of grimy kids tugging at my leg to sell me water, amid lines of cars, packed in every spare space with blankets, nappies and clothes. But that was nothing next to what I found on the other side of the frontier, past the scrums of shouting Syrians waving their documents at exasperated Turkish bureaucrats, the looted duty-free store, and finally the huge scrappy flags of the FSA that had been hastily sewn together and hoisted over their captured frontier. WELCOME TO FREE SYRIA, read the sign.

Free Syria looked like a set from Mad Max. Armed men, many with their faces covered, roamed through city streets pancaked by Assad’s airstrikes. Mortars had slammed into the top floors of the housing blocks, leaving masonry dangling like melted cheese, but families still lived on the lower floors and on the street traders sold trinkets, children’s jewellery, scarves and wristbands decorated with the FSA’s three-starred flag. Hawkers at the side of the road sold the only fuel available, an illegal brew that they dispensed from plastic jerry-cans, and which screwed up car engines in months.

In the rebel-held suburbs of Aleppo city in February 2013 I found the kind of idealistic young activists I had tracked down in Damascus – but they had been overwhelmed by the men with guns. Now, the so-called ‘liberated areas’ were battlegrounds for warlords who wanted to extract their share of bounty from the chaos. A thousand new little fiefdoms had sprouted in the space Assad left behind, each with an egocentric man drunk on hubris at the top and a score of lackeys beneath him. Former merchants, construction workers and imams had become self-styled leaders, their men either looting with abandon or, increasingly, imposing their own draconian ideas about Islam on the suffering population.

At night, the city went dark – at least, the rebel-held part did. The electricity was cut off there and most people relied on generators powered by the moonshine fuel from the roadsides. The tarry smoke caught in my nostrils as I sat inside a scruffy makeshift media centre, once a family home and still dotted with keepsakes on the cracked and dusty shelves. Outside, young rebels took over the streets at night to fire mortar rounds into government territory, just a couple of kilometres away and still fully lit and functioning. That inevitably drew return fire, and curses from everyone desperate for a full night’s sleep.

Stark daylight revealed huge piles of rubbish moulded into hillocks at the side of the Aleppo streets. Leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease spread by the sand flies living in the garbage, was tearing through the population, especially children. At a clinic set up by a local charity I watched distraught toddlers receive daily injections into their gaping sores. As we approached the city’s checkpoints, run by armed groups of increasingly hazy affiliation, my drivers and fixers would switch the music on their stereos to nasheed, a cappella chants about violence and loss beloved by the jihadis. On the road back to the Turkish frontier we passed through whole villages that had been recently flattened and abandoned.

The revolutionary promise of two years before had sunk beneath a malodorous tide of tragedy; front lines were crystallising across Aleppo city, and hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes as the regime’s air force launched relentless raids on rebel territory. The death toll was in the tens of thousands, and the war’s descent into extremism had started. Syria was already well on the way to giving the world a grim litany of new cultural reference points – barrel bombing, chemical attacks, heart-eating rebels, and Isis.

Crossing back over the border into Turkey at the end of any assignment in Syria was like stepping from a sepia film into full colour. Kilis, the first Turkish town after the Syrian frontier, is only forty miles from Aleppo as the crow flies. It is the beigest of any Turkish city, its tiny Ottoman heart smothered by rings and rings of new tower blocks housing masses of rural peasants. It would not feature in any Turkish guidebook, but compared to Aleppo it was paradise. Each time I came back I ripped off the black shawl I had used to cover my clothes, and drank in the colours hitting my eyes. After the privations of Aleppo, hot water, privacy, electricity and undisturbed sleep in a Turkish fleapit felt like a night at the Savoy.