The geography of death in Aleppo (2)
The protests and grassroots movement in Aleppo
Aleppans organized their first protest on March 25, 2011, just a few days after the initial demonstrations in Damascus and Dara’a. Aleppo shopkeepers organized two successful general strikes in June.30 June 30 became known as the “Volcano of Aleppo,” and protests took to the streets in at least ten different locations. A few weeks later, on August 17, protesters reached Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, Aleppo’s Tahrir Square, in large numbers for the first time. The largest protest to date, however, was during the burial of Aleppo’s Mufti, Ibrahim al-Salqini, on September 6, 2011, when protesters marched in the Old City and chanted “Better death than humiliation!” At that point, protests, many of which were spontaneous, were organized on a daily basis at Aleppo University. Lawyers and the Bar Association issued a statement to denounce the violence of the regime, and held a protest at the Palace of Justice that was brutally repressed by security forces. Tansiqiat (local coordinating committees) were created in the most active districts of Aleppo to coordinate protests, as well as provide medical assistance to the injured. Hospitals had become too risky to go to, since the security forces had a permanent presence there and were arresting anyone they suspected of protesting.
The Kurdish youth created their own Tansiqia, while university students established an Aleppo branch of the national Free Students Union. The residents of Sakhour and Marjeh districts, both in east Aleppo, were the first to create their own committees. These Tansiqiat organized large central protests as well as small, fleeting ones (known as “flying protests”) to avoid the security forces’ repression.31 One of the focal points for the protesters was Saadallah al-Jabiri Square (see Figure 2.13), which is located in the city center, outside the Old City. The regime turned it into a military point while protesters were attempting to reach and occupy it.
As the protests grew in size and the Syrian regime’s repression intensified, two opposing groups gradually formed. The first coalesced around the state’s repressive institutions (security branches, Syrian army, various militias, and Shabiha) and the new Aleppan business class connected to Rami Makhouf ’s networks.32 The Aleppan traditional merchant and industrial classes were split, because many were reluctant to oppose Assad due to the violence they had witnessed in the 1980s. In addition to these groups, Christian and Sunni religious leaders with whom the regime had cultivated a close relationship for decades mobilized their communities against the revolt. The protesters were mostly composed of the poor classes, who lived in informal settlements and the marginalized suburbs of east Aleppo, a segment of the shopkeepers and merchants, and university students.33
As the repression of protests intensified and massacres were committed in different regions in Syria, the peaceful uprising gradually turned into a military confrontation between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian army and the militias allied to it. In February 2012, insurgents began liberating villages in the north of Aleppo governorate. FSA fighters began appearing and defending protests in certain neighborhoods such as in Sukkari or Salaheddine (see Figure 2.4). 34 On July 19, 2012, the FSA entered Aleppo and took several neighborhoods; and in the following months, they liberated around 60 percent of the city, mostly districts located in the east.
Weaponising demographics
To counter the protests and undermine the uprising in Aleppo, the Syrian regime weaponized demographics by splitting the population along different axes: religious, ethnic, tribal, and economic. These divisions were both political and spatial, and were instrumental in the defeat of the insurgents in 2016. One of the goals of the regime was the purification of west Aleppo, where protests and any forms of dissent were harshly repressed.
In the following section, I examine spatial violence in Aleppo through the concept of urbicide. Nurhan Abujidi explains that the literature on urbicide can be divided into three main areas. The first one includes authors such as Marshal Berman and Stephen Graham, who suggest that urbicide should be understood as violence against urban forms. They note that the city symbolizes pluralism and cosmopolitanism and its destruction is by definition an attack on these values. Berman explains how the demolition of urban forms after World War II led to the destruction of ways of life in the inner city. The construction of new urban infrastructure to create the suburbs undermined the inner city. For this school, Le Baron Haussmann is the ultimate example of the urban planner who did not mind destroying entire working-class neighborhoods to secure the pacification of what he considered an unruly class.
In the same vein, other scholars such as Martin Shaw perceive urbicide as an anti-city war. The main historical example for him is the destruction of cities during the Balkan wars. This does not mean that rural areas would not experience any violence. For urbicidal processes to operate, the destruction of rural areas is necessary since this is where the roots of resistance are located.35
The second group points to the main effect of urbicide as the exclusion in the city. In this case, urbicide is defined as lack of plurality or heterogeneity that takes place. The destruction of the urban fabric is equivalent to undermining diversity in the city. Abujidi explains that “Urbicide for [Martin] Coward refers to the destruction of buildings in order to destroy shared places, spaces, and heterogeneity rather than limiting it to the destruction of urbanity conceived as specific ways of life in particular cities.”36 The main issue with that definition of urbicide is that in some cases the homogeneity of certain urban spaces is the main target as Derek Gregory demonstrates in the case of the Palestinian camp of Jenin, which was targeted by Israeli forces not necessarily because it represented a form of heterogeneity that needed to be fought at all cost. On the contrary, the main reason was that the camp needed to be destroyed primarily because it represented a way of life that is antagonistic to the Israeli way.37
Finally, there is a third trend that intellectuals Stephen Graham and Derek Gregory best represent. These scholars explain that urbicide is used against those who inhabit threatening spaces and as such can be annihilated.38 These authors explain that most wars take place in urban areas and as such, they are designed to target groups who operate within urban forms. According to this perspective, urbanism has been militarized to meet the challenges of modern warfare in post-colonial sites such as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine.
Nuhran Abujidi proposes yet a different definition of urbicide. She explains that there is a direct and an indirect urbicide. The direct type targets the urban either to annihilate the enemy or to destroy body politics. There is also an indirect type that does not entail the destruction of urban forms but should be understood as the continuation of urbicide by other means. An example of that is the Israeli continual war against Palestinians that entails a segmentation of the territory and the positioning of the checkpoints to hamper the circulation of Palestinians and maintain a tight control over them.
Abujidi proposes to study urbicidal processes in three different stages. The first one revolves around policies concerning planning an urban space. These policies could be part of an ongoing process of destruction of certain spaces and populations. It requires the demonization of these groups before the urbicidal policies could be applied in the spaces they inhabit. The second stage is usually more rapid, visible, and destructive. It consists of actions, mostly urban warfare, that the state utilizes to destroy the targeted groups. The last stage, according to Abujidi, concerns the afterlife of destruction. It revolves around the effect of urbicide on the population and urban texture. What the author emphasizes by proposing such a definition is that urbicide is a process with its own temporalities and velocities rather than a one-time action.39 Urbicidal processes are about ending diversity in the urban fabric. The regime was able to implement a clear separation between east and west.
The spatial tactics utilized by the regime in Aleppo can help us understand the way the urban fabric can become an extension to a military strategy. The regime’s weaponization of demographics prepared the stage for the deployment of urbicidal processes in Aleppo. The government’s demonization of specific groups was a prelude to the destruction of the spaces they inhabit. In what follows, I examine the regime’s spatial discourses about Aleppans and their neighborhoods, and how such rhetoric guided the geography of violence in the city.
Minorities
The regime produced a sectarian narrative about Syrian society that it instrumentalized against various social and political groups. As mentioned above, the war against the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s allowed the regime to label any political opponent as Islamist terrorist. This narrative became dominant again during the current rebellion. Assad and his government made it clear that no one could oppose the regime, and that those who did were labeled Takfiri,40 Wahhabi terrorist,41 or foreign agent. To taint the image of the revolution and intensify the sectarian strive, the security branches released more than 1,000 Islamists from Sednaya prison in 2012,42 in addition to thousands of petty criminals. The goal of the regime was to turn a popular rebellion into a Sunni war against minorities.43 Four ex-prisoners in particular had major destructive impacts on the revolution. The first, Abu Khaled al-Suri, was a close aide to Osama bin Laden, and was behind the Madrid terrorist attacks of 2004. The second, Amr “Abu Atheer” al-Absi, was in the leadership of ISIS when he was appointed as governor of Aleppo by al-Baghdadi. The remaining two, Zahran Aloush and Hassan Aboud, formed and led the two largest jihadist military groups in Syria.44 Most importantly, while the Syrian regime was releasing jihadists from Sednaya, it was also throwing thousands of secular and media activists in prison, many of whom died under torture.45
Aleppo is a microcosm of the Syrian social and political fabric, where different religious and ethnic groups have lived together for hundreds of years. The regime built al-Hamdanieh in the 1970s for Alawite officers and their families, many of whom worked in the adjacent military facilities (see Figure 2.5). In the 1970s and 1980s, the regime deployed a level of violence which Syrians had not witnessed before. The Muslim Brotherhood’s sectarian violence against Alawites led to the migration of many of them to coastal cities, where they felt safe. In 2011, Assad wanted minorities to believe that the current revolt was a repeat of sectarian violence that took place in past decades. He used a politics of fear to mobilize the Alawi community and prevent the formation of alliances between Syrians of different religious backgrounds. As a result, many Alawi families living in Aleppo panicked in 2011 and left the city.46
Al-Shaar, a district located east of the citadel, was bombed on a regular basis for four years. The systematic destruction of the area was part of a plan to turn it into an Alawi or Shia district and gradually change the sectarian composition of east Aleppo, which is primarily Sunni. The regime is repossessing some of the houses and plans to give land to the Sunni owners elsewhere in Aleppo.47
In July 2012, when insurgents entered the city, many Sunni middle and upper classes opposed the move. They wanted to avoid the destruction of Aleppo, which was the fate of other cities that the FSA had liberated. The Syrian regime’s message was clear: communities that allow insurgents to enter their districts would be bombed indiscriminately, and the entire population would be punished. In addition, the Crisis Group reported, “Aleppo’s urban establishment views jihadis as a socio-political threat, an expression of the rural underclass’ revolt. Secularists fear the spread and, ultimately, imposition of more conservative mores.”48 Since the middle and wealthy Sunni Aleppans lived in western Aleppo, it was easy for the regime to impose itself in these districts and isolate the rebellion in the eastern section. The regime solidified its control over these areas when jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, chose Aleppo as their point of entry to the Syrian rebellion. In that regard, Aleppo’s secular and non-jihadist groups were less dominant than in other cities. Al-Qaeda executed several suicide attacks in the city early on. The first Sharia courts emerged as early as August 2012.49 They were created in reaction to the Unified Judicial Council (UJC), which these groups perceived as being too secular. Despite their opposition, all other groups in Aleppo signed a declaration supporting the UJC.50
Syrian security propagated a sectarian narrative in various ways, including the Syrian Electronic Army, which was active on social media.51 It infiltrated protests to chant sectarian slogans, committed violence against regime forces and blamed protesters, and killed political opponents.52 Activists explain that, in the early days, they would sometimes hear sectarian slogans such as, “Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the coffins,” but would silence infiltrators who were chanting them with counter-slogans such as, “One, One, One, the Syrian people are one!” or “Syrians want freedom!”53 Most Christians living in Aleppo tried to stay neutral, while a segment supported the regime either for pragmatic reasons or out of fear of sectarian violence. However, many young Christians supported the rebellion, especially Aleppo University students who witnessed the violence of security forces in their campus. In October 2012, American journalist Clare Morgana Gillis interviewed a young Christian man who participated in protests in Aleppo against Assad. She writes,
Nearly all Aleppo’s Christians live in just two districts and both are still controlled by the Assad regime. “There’s a security checkpoint just under my house,” he says, “and the road to get here is very dangerous.” But attending anti-regime protests allows him to speak his mind freely, as few other Christians have been able to do during the last 18 months.54
Before the uprising, 250,000 Christians were living in Aleppo, which was roughly 12 percent of the Syrian Christian population. The repeated attacks on Christians by jihadists and undercover regime security gradually made it very difficult for many to empathize with the rebellion. The regime was successful in instilling a climate of fear among Christian communities. Aleppo Christians live mostly in four neighborhoods, namely, Suleimaniya, Jdeideh, al-Midan, and Azizieh (see Figure 2.5); and when insurgents entered the city in July 2012, it was relatively easy to prevent them from taking these spaces. The regime maintained the climate of fear and distrust through sectarian conflict. For example, two Orthodox bishops from Aleppo were kidnapped in April 2013.55 It is unclear whether the opposition or the regime was behind the kidnappings.56 The nephew of one of the bishops explains, “I have to say that kidnapping of the two bishops serves only the Syrian regime.”57
The Armenian community living in Aleppo was generally opposed to the revolt. In 2012, Armenian religious leaders issued a statement in which they rejected the military confrontation and asked their community to embrace a neutral position. To punish them, the regime took away a parliamentary seat that had been allocated to Armenians since 1971.58 Researcher Ara Sanjian explains, “[d]uring the first weeks of protests, most Armenians remained extremely loyal to the regime. Many of them willingly participated in officially sanctioned pro-Assad marches.”59 Several reasons explain the Armenian community’s anti-revolt sentiment, which is more pronounced among them than other Christian groups living in Aleppo. First, Turkey’s support for certain opposition groups made it difficult for Armenians to have a working relationship with the FSA. Second, the Syrian regime was successful in tarnishing the image of insurgents among minority groups, who believed most insurgents were radical fundamentalists. Third, Assad allowed Armenians to have their schools and clubs, and as such many felt they would lose their cultural autonomy in the event he was toppled.60
There are no accurate statistics about the number of Armenians living in Aleppo, but in the early 2000s, there were approximately 50,000.61 Many were concentrated in two neighborhoods, al-Midan and Suleimaniya, both of which are in northwest Aleppo (see Figure 2.5). Christian youths formed a militia to defend churches by recruiting members from the Boy Scouts and the neighborhood. The militia was initially allied to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD)62 (which shared its antipathy toward the Turkish-backed groups), but gradually sought funding and weapons from the regime. A small number were actively fighting alongside Assad forces, and created or joined pro-regime militias such as the Syrian Christian Resistance, the Martyrs of St. George Brigade, and the Warriors of Christ’s Aleppo.63
As the fighting intensified and members were killed, large segments of the Armenian community became more resentful and sectarian.64 The Armenian genocide was instrumentalized to denigrate the rebellion. An Armenian website wrote “[t]he Syrian Armenians call Islamist militants ‘Ottoman terrorists’ and say that they are defending their lands and their compatriots from the same forces that committed Armenian genocide in 1915.”65 Thousands of Armenians chose to leave their neighborhoods and traveled to Armenia, when insurgents entered the city. The state propaganda was successful in dividing communities and weaponizing them against each other.
Informal settlements and poverty
The agrarian counter-reform under Hafez al-Assad and his son impoverished the peasantry and pushed many to migrate to the city. The creation of the “Arab Belt” at the border with Turkey displaced more than 100,000 Kurds, many of whom ended up in the suburbs of large cities such as Aleppo. In addition, the Syrian state went through two phases of liberalization: the first one was initiated in the mid-1980s and intensified immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, while the second began when Bashar al-Assad seized power in 2000. The mismanagement of water resources for several decades and droughts in the late 2000s amplified the impact of economic reforms. The combination of these economic and political factors produced poverty on a large scale. In the case of Aleppo, the impoverished overwhelmingly stayed in the poor districts and informal settlements.
The overlap between the liberated areas of east Aleppo and the informal housing is striking. The insurgents controlled the vast majority of informal settlements (see Figure 2.7). The same thing can be said about the split between affluent and poor neighborhoods. None of the wealthy districts were under the control of the opposition (see Figure 2.6). This lack of social/class diversity gave the regime an important advantage. It was able to split the population along class lines and convinced the middle- and upper-class Aleppans that it would be in their interests to stand against what the regime portrayed as an invasion of rural Aleppo. In the end, the warning of the regime became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There was a takeover of Aleppo from the periphery. Many FSA fighters were poor and came from villages that surround Aleppo to the north and east. An FSA fighter explains, “[w]e liberated the rural parts of [Aleppo] province. We waited and waited for Aleppo [city] to rise, and it didn’t. We couldn’t rely on them to do it for themselves so we had to bring the revolution to them.”66
A map of Aleppo’s formal and informal housing provides a spatial understanding of how the regime devised a plan to control the city (Fig. 2.8). The density of the urban fabric in informal areas makes it difficult to control through a classical military force. As these areas are inhabited by the poor classes, it was easy for the regime to demonize and isolate them in the eyes of many middle- and upper-class Aleppans.
Youth and Aleppo University
In 2011, half the Syrian population was below the age of 25, 15 percent were unemployed, and large segments were poor. Evidently, the youth and university students were a source of worry for the regime, which utilized several strategies to prevent their participation in the revolts. The Mukhabrat67 put pressure on families to deter their children from taking part in the protests. In the early days, the regime identified individuals with high symbolic capital and designated them as middlemen. They played a central role in the negotiation between families and the regime. To release an activist from prison, the middleman would be the guarantee to the regime that the young activists would cease all political involvement. The middlemen would then use their leverage (the power to release prisoners) to mobilize families and communities against protesters.
Aleppo University became a focal point for the security forces because it represented a real danger. It had a central location, and was the only space in western Aleppo where spontaneous and planned protests would take place on a regular basis (see Figure 2.4). The first protest was on April 13, 2011, one month after the initial protests in Dara’a. It lasted five minutes before Baath students hijacked it and turned it into a pro-regime rally.68 The university was a unique space where students from different regions and diverse backgrounds discussed the uprising, organized protests, and refused to be silenced by the security forces. An Armenian student explained that the violence of security forces she witnessed at the university changed her mind about the revolt and the Syrian regime.69
The dormitory, which could accommodate up to 10,000 students, was the largest in Syria. Students from different regions, such as Raqqa, Homs, and Hasakah, as well as northern Aleppo, studied at Aleppo University and lived on campus. Many of them had lost relatives and friends during protests in their regions of origin, and had seen the FSA liberate their villages. As such, the university was a revolutionary space that pushed against the conservatism of the city. By November 2012, the students’ legal team had identified 99 students who had been killed by security forces during protests. The Baath party office on campus was turned into a headquarters for the Shabiha and the security forces. Students from west Aleppo could not protest in their district because of the many checkpoints and community pressure in their neighborhoods. Instead, they would organize protests at the university or join the ones in south and east Aleppo, in working-class neighborhoods such as Salaheddine and Sakhour (see Figure 2.4).
On May 3, 2012, as the protests became larger and louder, security forces shot at the students and killed four.70 A few weeks later, when a UN delegation visited Aleppo University as part of an investigatory tour, the students organized the largest protest in Aleppo, gathering around 10,000–15,000 people, and flew the independence flag on campus before being attacked by the Shabiha.71 In the following days, security forces attacked students in the dormitory and wrecked their rooms, and finally closed the university before the end of the academic year. The last time Aleppo University had been closed by the regime was in 1980, when the city was under siege.72
The students kept protesting, despite the violence and constant threat, until the Assad forces bombed the university in January 2013 and killed 87 students. Journalist Malak Chabkoun writes,
Students who witnessed the attack said they saw regime planes shelling the university, but what is significant here is what Shabiha did immediately after the attack which killed at least 87—campus security closed the university’s gate, trapping students inside, and Shabiha began an impromptu protest in support of Bashar al-Assad—a protest amid a scene of bodies and blood, further terrifying the students who had witnessed the attack and preventing them from getting medical attention.73
The attack ended the cycle of protests and organizing in the only space of dissent in west Aleppo, and reinforced the boundaries between east and west. Some of the students moved to east Aleppo, while many left the city. After the bombing of the university, the level of violence against east Aleppo only intensified.
Tribes of Aleppo
The French colonial power weaponized tribes against nationalist and progressive groups operating in Syrian cities. When the Baath rose to power, it marginalized and revoked their privileges due to their collaboration with the colonial power. Syrian tribes couldn’t control or manage the land anymore, as the customary law (urf) had been abolished.74 The Baath believed the tribes were hindering its political and economic programs. During the Islamist rebellion in the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Assad altered the Baath’s relationship with the tribes. He understood that tribal alliances could benefit the regime when faced with an existential crisis.
Tribal solidarity is a very effective tool to deploy against political opposition. The Syrian regime has always had two discourses toward tribalism. On the one hand, the Baath party considered them a residue from a past that needed eradication. On the other, tribes were instrumental in maintaining Assad in power. To reward their loyalty, larger tribes were given permanent seats in parliament. Researcher Haian Dukhan writes,
Hafez al-Assad used his patronage network with the tribes and unleashed their power to check the Islamists. Despite its national slogans of “no sectarianism” and “no tribalism,” the Syrian regime did not hesitate to seek the aid of the tribes to suppress the uprising in 1982 in Hama, the stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood.75
The Busha’ban tribe, who are from the Raqqa governorate, was sent to Aleppo to crush the Brotherhood rebellion. Assad used them to police the borders between Syria and Iraq and prevented the Muslim Brotherhood from smuggling weapons from Iraq. After 1982, they were rewarded with additional seats in parliament. Bedouin tribes loyal to the Syrian regime were used again against the Druze revolt in 200076 and the Kurdish rebellion in 2004; they killed protesters in both cases.77
When the uprising began, a growing number of bureaucrats, soldiers, and security agents defected. To make up for the disintegration of the state, the regime relied on identities and praxes that pre-date the nation-state. In that context, tribal, religious, and regional identities played an increasingly important role. The regime could not simply trust soldiers who might defect at any moment because they were from a region or a tribe that rebelled against Assad. It used some of the reliable tribes that it had tested in the past and had rewarded multiple times for their loyalty. Not only did these loyal tribes help to crush protests, but they also prevented their own members from participating in the revolt. The unconditional loyalty of some leaders ended up splitting certain tribes.
According to Edward Dark, the al-Berri clan is the regime’s primary enforcer in the city. “They don’t even try to hide it and openly boast of receiving weapons and arms from the regime,” he says. “There are lots of others too, usually convicted criminals involved in various smuggling or drugs. They were offered pardons and funds in order to help the security forces in the crackdown.”78 There were around 30,000 Shabiha in Aleppo, many of them recruited from the tribes.79 Al-Berri, the largest and most powerful tribe in Aleppo, was instrumental in crushing the revolts, arresting activists, and killing political opponents. In addition, many tribe members lived in Bab al-Nayrab and Salihin, both of which are located in east Aleppo, and as such could police these areas effectively (see Figure 2.8).
When the FSA entered Aleppo in July 2012, there was an agreement of non-aggression between it and al-Berri, which was violated by the latter. The FSA retaliated by brutally executing al-Berri’s leader, Zeno Berri, and expelling al-Berri members from east Aleppo.80 Through this confrontation, the FSA removed one of the regime’s last outposts in east Aleppo and the boundaries between east and west were reasserted once again.
Kurds
Kurds are the largest minority in Aleppo and live primarily in two districts, namely, Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh (see Figure 2.5). Kurds migrated to Aleppo in the 1970s–1980s from Afrin and Kobani, two Kurdish cities in the north, near the Turkish borders. To prevent Kurds from establishing their own nation-state, the Baath tried to create an “Arab Belt” on the border with Turkey. As a result, many Kurds were displaced from their villages, lost their land, and were replaced by Arabs who were brought from other areas.81 Historian David McDowall writes, “A major socio-economic consequence of dispossession in the Arab Belt was increased Kurdish labour migration mainly to Damascus and Aleppo in search of work.”82
Most Kurds preferred to stay in these districts, primarily to avoid Arab discrimination toward them. These densely populated urban spaces are located in the northeast of Aleppo and have large sections of informal settlements. Infrastructure hardly exists in Sheikh Maqsoud, where there is no high school and only two primary schools, while some streets are unpaved. Since there are very few local jobs, the residents, many of whom work in the service economy, have to cross government checkpoints on a daily basis.83 Middle- and upper-class Kurds live in Sabeel and Syriaan, two neighborhoods that are majority Christian.
In September 2012, the PYD and its military arm, The Popular Protection Units (YPG), controlled the district and evicted other Kurdish groups, including Yekiti, from the city. The PYD is a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is led by charismatic leader Abdullah Öcalan, who exercises great influence on Kurdish politics in Turkey and Syria. The PKK was originally a Marxist–Leninist party, but more recently embraced democratic confederalism because its founder was inspired by the work of political theorist Murray Bookchin, who theorized about autonomy, confederalism, and anarchism. The PYD opposed the Syrian regime as well as the uprising, and instead concentrated on implementing the principles of democratic confederalism in Northern Syria and the Kurdish districts of Aleppo. The Syrian regime’s shelling of Sheikh Maqsoud on September 6, 2012, killing 21 Kurdish civilians, severed the relationship between the two.84 Opposition forces attempted to control Ashrafieh, but were
pushed back by YPG forces without much fighting. The FSA preferred to negotiate a non-aggression agreement with the PYD to keep the focus on the regime. The district has a strategic location, since it is located on a hilltop in between insurgent and government areas. In addition, it is situated near Castello Road, which became a central node for the opposition and the only point of access to east Aleppo. Thus, it was vital for the FSA to have a good relationship with the PYD.
Tensions between the PYD and Syrian opposition, however, gradually grew, for several reasons. The Kurds were fighting ISIS in the north and progressively became the dominant power in the region. The Turkish government formed a coalition of Syrian opposition forces to fight and prevent the Kurdish forces from consolidating their gains. These confrontations in Northern Syria—between Arabs and Turkmen on the one hand, and Kurds and their allies on the other—had catastrophic consequences on the relationship between Arabs and Kurds in Aleppo. As Sebastian Gonano reports, “In response, various rebel groups repeatedly and indiscriminately shelled Sheikh Maqsoud, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians.”85 In addition, Islamist groups in Aleppo, including al-Qaeda, had an antagonistic relationship with Kurds due to their progressive and secular politics. Opposition forces imposed a siege on the Kurdish district, leading to the deterioration of the living condition and shortages in water and electricity.86 Amnesty International issued a report in May 2016 that shows opposition forces committed war crimes against the Kurdish population in Aleppo.87
When the Syrian forces reached Castello Road in July 2016, the YPG helped them to impose a siege on east Aleppo. In November, the cooperation between the regime forces and the YPG became more evident.88 The Baath regime has oppressed the Kurds for decades by displacing them from northern regions and forming the “Arab belt” over a distance of 280km to separate Syrian Kurds from Turkish ones. It stripped hundreds of thousands of Kurds of their Syrian citizenship, crushed their rebellion in 2004, killed 36, and injured hundreds.89 There were thousands of Kurds in Syrian prisons for political reasons.90
In addition, the regime repressed the Kurdish grassroots movement and killed Mashaal Tammo, one of its leaders.91 Despite these atrocities, the Syrian regime capitalized on the divergences between opposition groups and the Kurds to crush the politics of life in the city. The strategic location of Sheikh Maqsoud was a vital asset for the regime and its forces. The PYG helped the regime impose the siege on east Aleppo in June 2016, and six months later take the territories controlled by the insurgents.
Palestinians
According to UNRWA, there were approximately half a million Palestinians living in Syria prior to the 2011 revolt. Displaced Palestinians fled to Syria in two phases: the first was after 1948 partition of Palestine; and the second was a result of the June 1967 Arab–Israeli War. The First Palestinian camp in Aleppo, al-Nayrab, is situated eight miles southeast of Aleppo and was established in a French barracks (see Figure 2.5).92
When Palestinians arrived in 1949, there were no independent Pales tinian organizations. Around 20,000 refugees lived in the camp before the revolt. Its isolation and the lack of connections to Palestinian organizations made the task of controlling the camp rather easy for Syrian security. The second camp, Handarat, where 5,500 Palestinians live, was built in 1962 in northeast Aleppo (see Figure 2.5). By the early 1960s, Palestinians in the diaspora had their own organizations and were active in Palestinian camps in Syria. Thus, the population’s living conditions in Handarat were superior to al-Nayrab, and their political autonomy was better compared to other Palestinian camps.93
The Baath party had a pan-Arab program and pro-Palestine rhetoric, but Palestinians living in Syria and Lebanon were as oppressed as any other Syrians. The Syrian army invaded Lebanon in 1976 and backed right-wing militias who massacred Palestinians in Tel-al-Zaatar, leaving several thousands dead or wounded. To control Palestinian politics in the Arab World, Assad created and funded several Palestinian organizations. These groups were based in Damascus and had no real autonomy but were effective in creating a rift in Palestinian politics and weakening the Palestine Liberation Organization.94 In the 1970s, the military intelligence created Far Falistin (The Palestine Branch), which was supposed to support the Palestinian struggle by gathering strategic information but it quickly became one of the symbols of their oppression in Syria. The Palestine Branch is notorious for the gruesome torture that Palestinians who oppose Assad were subjected to for decades.95
In 2011, Palestinians, like other Syrians, began protesting throughout Syria and built an important grassroots movement in al-Yarmouk, the largest camp in the suburbs of Damascus. To neutralize Palestinians and prevent them from participating in the popular revolts, the Syrian government reactivated its discourse about Palestinian rights, while at the same time tasking Palestinian organizations loyal to the regime to crush the grassroots movement. In Aleppo, Muhammad al-Said, who was loyal to the regime and had a good relationship with Air Force security before the revolution, played an important role in preventing Palestinians’ participation in the revolt. Before the revolt, he helped Palestinians living in al-Nayrab get the necessary permits to build houses or travel, and used that as leverage to prevent the emergence of independent Palestinian organizing in the camp. In 2012, he helped create Liwa al-Quds (The Jerusalem Brigade), a Palestinian militia with 500 Palestinians mostly recruited from al-Nayrab, Handarat, and al-Ramal in Latakia. The militia was Palestinian in name only, since most of its 3,500 members were not Palestinians.96
To prevent Palestinians from taking part in the revolts, Syrian security staged the kidnapping of 17 al-Quds fighters who were traveling in a bus; 14 of them were found dead a few days later. The regime then used the disfigured bodies to blame insurgents for the massacre and turn Palestinians in both camps against the revolt.
Unlike the vast majority of Palestinians in Damascus, who supported the revolt, most Palestinians living in Aleppo were either opposed to the revolt or silent. In March 2015, after liberating Idlib, FSA found pictures of two al-Quds fighters who were among the group slaughtered inside a security branch. The pictures proved that the torture took place inside the security branch, but the harm was done, and it was too late to alter the opinion of Aleppo Palestinians.97 This is one example among many that illustrates the ways Assad instrumentalized the Palestine question to counter opposition to the government. In the end, neutralizing most Palestinians and creating a militia inside the camps in the north and south was strategic and important for the regime to maintain control over east Aleppo. Urbicidal processes operated through the demographic mosaic of Aleppo. The spatial distribution of the population was the foundation on which Assad built its military strategies. Some areas were used as buffer zones or obstacles while others played a role in the siege of east Aleppo. Overall, the regime instrumentalized the demographics of Aleppo to generate a well-calibrated politics of death.
Notes
30. Bara Halabi, “Dignity Strike: the old market—Skayta, 2-6-2012,” YouTube. Video file. Posted June 3, 2012. Accessed June 2, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=voF4fBY2tjQ; and Syrian Revolution Documentation Center, “Aleppo, Old Manshiyya—General Strike 16-6-2012 (Arabic),” YouTube. Video file. Posted June 16, 2012. Accessed June 2, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBFd9FV4qdg.
31. Saber Darwīsh and Mohammad Abī Samrā, ma’si halb: al-thourah al-maghdourah wa rasaa’l al-muhasarin [Tragedies of Aleppo: The Betrayed Revolution and Messages of the Besieged] (Milan: al-Mutawassit, 2016), 42.
32. Rami Makhlouf is the cousin of Bashar al-Assad, and the wealthiest person in Syria. He was part of Assad’s inner circle, and played a central role repressing the revolt by funding militias. Protesters throughout Syria created songs and slogans to denounce his corruption and repressive role in the revolt.
33. Mouhana, “The Regime and Revolution.”
34. FSA1operations, “Aleppo—al-Sukkari District. The Free Army facing Shabih (Arabic).” YouTube. Video file. Last modified March 23, 2012. Accessed June 2, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVT8BckCdZA.
35. Nurhan Abujidi, Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience (London: Routledge, 2014), 29.
36. Ibid., 30–2.
37. Ibid., 32.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Ibid., 40–2.
40. A Takfiri is a Muslim who accuses another Muslim of apostasy.
41. The regime claimed that Syrian Islamists were paid by the Wahhabist Saudi family to oppose Assad. The Syrian government argued that protesters were manipulated by Saudi security to destabilize the Syrian state, and as such undermine the axis of resistance, which includes Syria, Iran, Palestinian groups, and Hezbollah.
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