The Geography of Death in Aleppo (1)
Leave, convert, or die.
—King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to the Jews of Spain
Down with the regime and the opposition…
Down with the Arab and Muslim Worlds…
Down with the United Nations Security Council…
Down with the World…
Down with Everything…
—Occupied Kafranbel, October 14, 2011
Aleppo, once Syria’s capital of classical music, sophisticated cuisine, and Islamic culture, today lies in ruins. Insurgents controlled two-thirds of the city for four years before it fell to the regime in December 2016. This chapter begins with a brief urban history that explores the ways Aleppo’s urban fabric has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. It argues that the city’s urban forms from various historical stages, including the Ottoman Empire, French Mandate, and post-independence, have been reorganized and utilized by the Syrian forces since 2011 to break the city.
Using the concept of “urbicide” (the deliberate and systematic destruction of a city), the chapter investigates the various spatial techniques developed by the Syrian regime to destroy Aleppo and its people. These techniques include the strategic positioning of snipers on tall buildings in a vast network throughout the city to segment space and block the circulation of civilians and insurgents. Snipers produced a cartography of fear that terrorized Aleppo residents, altered the tempo of life and death, and killed thousands. In addition, the Syrian regime weaponized the demographics of the city to crush the revolt. The Syrian forces instrumentalized the ethnic, religious, cultural, and class composition of the city to fracture the urban fabric and prevent the crystallization of revolutionary identities or urban solidarities. Finally, urbicide in Aleppo took the form of siege, destruction of infrastructure, and displacement of the population. As a result, east Aleppo was emptied of its population; epidemics and starvation were rampant; the death toll was staggering; and life expectancy dropped by more than a decade.
Ottoman Aleppo
Aleppo was the third largest city in the Ottoman Empire and a main economic hub between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Merchants traveled long distances to buy Aleppo’s luxury goods.1 European countries maintained consuls in the city from the sixteenth century onwards to trade with Muslim merchants. By the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans gradually began to establish commercial relationships with Christians, which weakened the influence of Sunni notables in the city.2
To modernize its institutions and address structural problems, the Ottomans introduced the Tanzimat in 1839, which were major reforms to help the Empire better integrate the world economy, control nationalist movements within its territories, and to curb the increasing influence of European countries outside it. These reforms led to significant transformations in Aleppo, including a new taxation system, land reform, and a recruitment campaign for a modern army. The Tanzimat were not well received by the local bureaucrats, who believed Istanbul was using them to impose direct control over the provinces. The Muslim population was frustrated with the new tax, which until then was imposed on non-Muslims only. In addition, the construction of new churches was not well received among the same Muslim population. Ross Burns notes,
As Aleppo became increasingly drawn into the world economy, […] the Christians […] could easily slip into roles as the point of contact with outside importers or exporters. The barriers to full Christian participation in society were being torn down by the Ottoman administration […].3
Prior to the 1850 riots, there were frequent confrontations between Janissaries and Ashrafs. The former were the Ottoman Empire’s elite infantry, but were disbanded in 1826 due to their refusal to follow Sultan Mahmud II’s orders. They mostly lived in eastern Aleppo and had a strong corporatist identity. The Ashraf, the descendants of the Prophet, were the city’s elite and were based in western Aleppo.4 The residents of eastern Aleppo did not play any significant role in A’yan politics (notable politics) and were politically marginalized.
The combination of these factors led to a riot in east Aleppo on October 17, 1850. The Janissaries, Kurds, Turkmen, and Bedouin who were economically and politically marginalized and lived in eastern Aleppo attacked the Christian northern districts, namely, Jdeideh and Salibeh. The rioters looted the wealthy Christians’ stores in the bazaar, attacked churches and individual Christian homes, and killed several dozen people.5
After the riot, the British put pressure on the Ottoman government and requested that Muslim residents repay an indemnity to Christian merchants and return their properties. The wealthy Aleppans were humiliated and refused to pay the indemnity, as it would have implied “that they were collectively guilty for something that ‘Bedouins and Kurds’ had done.”6 A second round of fighting between eastern and western neighborhoods erupted in November 1850, when the Ottoman central government sent its army to crush the rebellion. In the end, the army killed thousands in the eastern neighborhoods of Bab al-Nayrab, Qarliq, and Quarliq.7 It is worth noting that the revolts of Damascus and Mount Lebanon in 1860 did not spread to Aleppo, primarily due to the fear of retaliation, in the event its inhabitants protested.8 Ottoman violence in Aleppo a decade earlier had a lasting impact and residents were reluctant to participate out of fear of retaliation.
The city witnessed a major urban transformation at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of the Tanzimat. New streets and squares were built, as well as a tramway and other infrastructures.9 Wealthy Aleppans moved to the west into newly established Christian neighborhoods such as Aziziyya and Hamidiyya, as well as Jamiliyya, a Muslim and Jewish quarter. In the second half of the nineteenth century, these new neighborhoods had all the amenities of modern life, including access to electricity and fresh water (see Figure 2.1).10 Historian Nora Lafi notes, “[these neighborhoods] embodied the imperial modernity. Engineers and planners, including foreign experts, were asked to connect this new city to the old one, in a logic that was more one of integration than of juxtaposition.”11 The social and urban reorganization reinforced the split between west and east and still exists in present-day Aleppo.
The French mandate
After the Ottoman Empire’s partitioning, the French colonial power seized Syria and Lebanon, despite the local population’s resistance. The nationalist revolts brought together a wide array of social and political groups who fought the French from 1918 to 1927. After World War I and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, Aleppo’s economy began declining, primarily because it was cut off from its hinterland. The new borders between Iraq and Syria made it more difficult for the city to trade with Iraqi cities, which were essential to its economy.12 The structural transformations of the economy and politics in Aleppo had major implications on the social composition of urban classes. Historian Keith David Watenpaugh explains that it is vital to avoid reductive binaries that, in the case of Aleppo, oppose the wealthy center to the periphery. He explains that the middle classes, the educated professionals, opposed traditional elites in Aleppo. They were not necessarily a social class in the economic sense. Instead, they built an identity in opposition to the Aleppine notables and the marginalized groups living in the east.
The middle class was able to carve a space for itself in Aleppo’s politics through its mastery of what Watenpaugh calls the technologies of the public sphere, which include the production of public discourse and the utilization of mass media to channel their ideas about nationalism, secularism, and modernity. After World War I and the French occupation of Syria, the middle class tried to negotiate a new position in which the Ottoman Empire would still play a role, while at the same time producing a new identity that was both Syrian and Arab. Aleppo’s political elite was divided between those who sided with the Arab government led by Emir Faysal, who was based in Damascus, and those who preferred a form of autonomy with southwestern Anatolia, since it remained an important market for Aleppo’s merchandise.13
The French attempted to reorganize the urban structure of Aleppo to undermine the resistance and counter anti-French sentiment. In 1929, the French Mandate asked urbanist Danger brothers to produce a master plan for Aleppo. Their first plan proposed to separate the Old City from the new western section, and destroy segments of the historic zone. The design reproduced a colonial trope according to which the Ottoman city is irrational and anomic, and consequently must be quarantined from the modern segment. Describing Aleppo in 1932, René Danger wrote,
[t]he streets are mysterious, with capricious twists […] They evoke the Middle Ages and wars of religion, treachery and revenge, battles on doorsteps and in dead ends. Once the threshold has been crossed, the courtyard provides a contrasting image of a quiet and pleasant life in the cool privacy of open courtyards around a reflecting pool of water.14
The colonial power rejected the plan out of fear it would be opposed in the League of Nations.15 The Danger brothers proposed a second plan in which the old Arab city would be preserved and modern urban spaces would be built around it. The contrast between the two was stark. French Orientalist Jean Sauvaget contrasted the regularity and order of the antique Roman city to the irregularity of the Muslim city. For him, “The Aleppo of the Ottomans is nothing but an illusion (‘un trompe l’oeil’)—a sumptuous facade behind which there are only ruins.”16
Daniel Neep explains that the colonial power in Syria deployed an array of techniques to manage the Syrian population and geography. In his book Occupying Syria under the French Mandate (2012), he explores the various forms of colonial violence the French used to crush the rebellion in the 1920s and 1930s. Using a Foucaudian framework, he analyzes several forms of power French administrators and military experts used to reorganize the urban geography of Damascus and Aleppo. Based on Orientalist knowledge about an ‘‘unchanging” and ‘‘primitive” Middle East, they developed a spatial strategy to quell resistance.
Neep explains that the French developed a twofold strategy to undermine a mounting opposition to their rule. The first part was based on disciplinary spaces that fragment and isolate the rebels that were based at different times in the Syrian North and South, as well as al-Ghouta. The colonial military and administrators found that classical models of warfare were ineffective in Syria. Instead of complete domination of a space, which is unpractical and difficult, they employed a strategy that required the compartmentalization of space to hamper the movement of rebels. These disciplinary spaces undermined the resistance of rebels and made their movements from one area to another much more challenging. The second technique was developed to address the problem of what they perceived as the primitive urban spaces in cities such as Aleppo or Damascus.17
Colonial administrators believed that urbanism could resolve many urban anomies they perceived as inherent to the region. By doing so, they wanted to facilitate the French “civilizing” mission in Syria. Some of these colonial strategies were brought from other French colonies and deployed in the Syrian context. According to oriental knowledge developed in the colonies, urban planners believed the Old City should be preserved as an unchanging urban form and the native population in it should be maintained. The modern city should be created outside the perimeter of the old one. In between, a sanitary cordon should be inserted to make the separation permanent and prevent old and new spaces from intermixing. The Sunni Muslims would preserve their traditions in these impenetrable spaces while simultaneously undergoing a major “cleansing” that would ultimately improve their livelihood and keep them content, but also prevent the spreading of epidemics within the Old City, and, more importantly outside it, in the European section.
The European city would follow a rational urban matrix where residential and industrial zones would be separated and where access and flow would be prioritized for hygienic and military reasons. What is important for Neep is that the boundaries between civilian and military spaces are oftentimes blurred. The techniques utilized in urbanism often migrate and are redeployed for military purposes.
Post-independence
In 1954, André Gutton, a professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, proposed a new master plan for Aleppo. His modernist plan required the creation of new streets that would have fragmented the old Aleppo and destroyed important sections of the historic city. Gutton’s guiding principles were: 1) to reorder the Old City; 2) to maintain better sanitation; and 3) to emphasize historic monuments. The Old City, according to him, needed to be cleansed and turned into a museum. By viewing the city as a labyrinth-like structure that required order, Gutton, like the colonial power before him, wanted to end the spirit of clans that resisted modernity and permeated the old neighborhoods.18
Overall, the Old City was simply neglected for several decades, since none of the plans were implemented, due to their flaws. Consequently, many urban notables began leaving the Old City and renting out their houses to poorer or rural families. Their preferred destination was west Aleppo, because it offered all the amenities of modern life. The Syrian government implemented the part of the Gutton plan that focused on car circulation and ignored the remaining aspects of the plan.
After the 1963 coup and the Baath party’s rise to power, urban notables were weakened, in accordance to the new ideology, and their houses in the Old City were seized and turned into multiple smaller apartments. Jews in Aleppo were attacked and their houses burnt, while many were forced into exile.19 Gyoji Banshoya, a Japanese planner who did work on Old Damascus and Old Aleppo, proposed a master plan for Aleppo in the late 1970s. The main idea for him was to end the abandonment of the Old City by connecting it to new quarters. Unlike his predecessor André Gutton, who wanted to cut off the Old City from west to east, Banshoya’s main proposal was to reconnect both old and new, while at the same time preserving the historic quarters (see Figure 2.2). Banshoya became the chief urban planner in Aleppo, producing a new master plan for the city in 1975.20 His plan proposed smaller streets and parking lots behind the khans. According to historian Kosuke Matsubara,
“Banshoya tried here to manage both conservation and activation of the old urban fabric at the same time.”21 The modernist influence of Michel Écochard, one of the prominent colonial urban planners, with whom he had worked, was clear. Although he turned down the intrusive nature of the roads proposed by Gutton and the level of destruction of the old fabric of the city, nonetheless he wanted to implement major changes. This led to the emergence of a grassroots movement in the city composed of urban notables and others who wanted to preserve the historic city and prevent the implementation of the master plan. Their movement garnered enough opposition to stop the implementation of the master plan and register the Old City as a historic monument at the UNESCO.22
1980: Aleppo’s urban rebellion
In the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood embraced a version of Islamic socialism without real economic depth. Their program was appealing to the middle and lower-middle urban classes, who were predominantly Sunnis. They had a small base in the rural regions, but no significant support.23 After the Baath’s rise to power in 1963, the Brotherhood retained its appeal among urban classes. Their primary constituencies remained the small bourgeoisie, shop owners, and artisans who had political and economic grievances against the Baath. The gradual eradication of the Sunni officers from the Baath further alienated Sunni urban classes, who believed rural and Alawite communities were becoming hegemonic in the political sphere. The combination of these factors led to the radicalization of a segment of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Hama branch, led by Marwan Hadid, organized a student protest in 1964, which turned into a city-wide revolt against the Baath regime. The revolt in Hama was mostly a reaction against the Baath program of nationalization of Sunni factories as well as the marginalization of Sunni landowners. By the mid-1970s, the divergence between Hadid’s faction and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood grew wider. He consequently split from them and established his own group, The Fighting Vanguard of the Party of God. His followers believed “the impious Baath” had to be removed by force. In 1976, he was arrested and killed in prison.
The Damascus branch of the Muslim Brotherhood believed that working with the regime would benefit it. Its base was primarily composed of small bourgeoisie and merchants who aspired to build a close relationship with the regime that would benefit their economic interests. Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu explains, “[a] sort of de facto axis developed between military Alawis and the commercially minded Damascenes. The traders of Suq al-Hamidiyya never had it so good as in these years.”24
The Hama and Aleppo branches of the Brotherhood were radically opposed to such an alliance. Several factors allowed their position to prevail, and pushed their party to adopt a militant approach toward the Assad regime. First, the Baath’s military defeat against Israel in 1967 had a lasting negative impact on Syrian society. Second, the Baath support for rural classes at the expense of urban ones amplified the dissatisfaction of the latter. Third, large segments of the urban Sunni believed that the Baath policies benefited primarily Alawites and sidelined non-Alawites. When the Syrian government drafted a new constitution that cancelled the requirement for the president to be Muslim, the Brotherhood opposed it vehemently, demanding the reinstitution of the clause. Finally, Syria was facing a sharp economic crisis in the early 1970s, combined with an especially high inflation on basic commodities and rent.
After the Syrian army invasion of Lebanon in 1976, the Muslim Brotherhood’s and leftist parties’ opposition to the Assad regime intensified. The Muslim Brotherhood embarked on a campaign of assassinations, and in 1980, it organized a general strike, which led to the closing of the Market in Aleppo. The Fighting Vanguard killed more than 80 cadets, mostly Alawites, at the Military Artillery School in Aleppo, which triggered a wave of sectarian violence. The regime retaliated with a campaign of violence against the city. The Brotherhood was powerful and rooted in the city, and could challenge the regime in Aleppo in ways that it could not in Damascus. After the academy massacre, the Vanguard put pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood to become more involved in the confrontation against the regime. Historian Tine Gade notes, “The security situation deteriorated to the extent that people started to flee from the worst-affected cities, and large sectors of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, were reported to be ‘out-of-bounds’ for the government’s forces.”25
In March 1980, Aleppo and Hama shop owners shut down the city for several days with a successful strike to protest the price controls imposed by the government to deter inflation. The Syrian regime deployed the 3rd Division and the Defense Brigades, and began a brutal crackdown on the city that resulted in several massacres. General Shafiq Fayad told his soldiers to “kill a thousand people a day to rid the city of the Muslim Brother vermin.”26 Residents and random passers-by in three districts, al-Masharqa, Bustan al-Qasr, and Suq al-Ahad, were rounded up and summarily executed (see Figure 2.3). The regime punished these quarters in particular because they did not show enough opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood. When the regime’s military campaign finally ended, several thousand Aleppans were killed and injured, and thousands more were thrown in jail.
After the military campaign, the regime devised plans to alter the urban fabric of the city to prevent another rebelion in Aleppo. Analyzing Aleppo’s urban plans, Jwanah Qudsi writes,
Gutton’s plan was met with resistance, and seldom executed when it was published. However, elements of it were adopted in the 1970s and 1980s by the new Baath regime, when the Old City’s topographical and social fabric gave refuge to a resistance movement: the Muslim Brotherhood. The new arterial roads that were sliced through the Old City were essential for the deployment of armies through the area (not unlike Haussmanian roads in post-revolution Paris), and with time, allowed for the degradation and destruction of its patrimony.27
In the mid-1980s, due to the liberalization of the economy failure of land reform, many poor peasants began migrating in large numbers to the suburbs and informal settlements in Aleppo. Investment Law No. 10 of 1991 allowed Syrian and foreign businesses to invest in the industry and bring in hard currency without state control. These economic policies produced a new elite class that had strategic relationships with the regime. In addition, the Syrian government allowed middlemen to take over agricultural co-ops and state-owned lands and operate them, which exasperated small peasants and agricultural workers. The middlemen and large landowners gained from the new economic changes at the expense of the middle and poor classes.
Meanwhile, the pauperization of rural classes pushed many families to migrate to Aleppo. Many came from villages located to the north of Aleppo, such as Huraitan, Anadan, Tal Rifat, or Maraeh, and moved into poor neighborhoods such as Salaheddine, Seif al-Dawla, or Sakhour (see Figure 2.4); while those coming from Darat Izat lived in Kalasseh. These patterns of migration from Aleppo’s countryside formed specific clusters within Aleppo that would have major implications when the revolt began in 2011. When rebels in Northern Aleppo began protesting and later fighting the Syrian forces, they were in constant contact with their families and friends in Aleppo. This explains to a certain extent how revolutionary knowledge was shared between the countryside and Aleppo, and how the geography of the revolt developed in the city.28
The second wave of migration was mostly due to the drought that lasted several years, from 2006 to 2010. This was combined with another wave of liberalization that Bashar al-Assad initiated in 2000. The economic implications of these policies on Aleppans were significant. On the one hand, the isolation of Aleppo due to its role in the 1980 rebellion was finally ended. A class of Aleppan bourgeois began emerging and taking advantage of the Syrian regime’s openness toward their city. On the other hand, the economic liberalization and neglect of the agrarian sector produced a precarious rural class that moved in large numbers to the peripheries of the city to search for new opportunities.29
Notes
1. Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism in the Arab Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 32.
2. Bruce Masters, “The political economy of Aleppo in an age of Ottoman reform,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, no. 1/2 (2010): 290–316.
3. Ross Burns, Aleppo: A History (New York: Routledge, 2017), 256.
4. Masters, “The political economy of Aleppo,” 293.
5. Burns, Aleppo, 257.
6. Bruce Masters, “The 1850 Events in Aleppo: an aftershock of Syria’s incorporation into the capitalist world system,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22 (1990), 8.
7. Burns, Aleppo, 257.
8. Masters, “The political economy of Aleppo,” 300.
9. Nora Lafi, “Building and destroying authenticity in Aleppo: heritage between conservation, transformation, destruction, and re-invention,” in Christoph Bernhardt, Martin Sabrow, and Achim Saupe (Eds.), Gebaute Geschichte: Historische Authentizität im Stadtraum (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 206–28, www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835330139-gebaute-geschichte.html.
10. Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East, 48.
11. Lafi, “Building and destroying authenticity in Aleppo,” 206–28.
12. Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 450.
13. Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East, 48.
14. As cited in Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria under the French Mandate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 150–1.
15. Lafi, “Building and destroying authenticity in Aleppo,” 206–28.
16. André Raymond, “Islamic city, Arab city: Orientalist myths and recent views,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21, no. 1 (1994), 5.
17. Neep, Occupying Syria, 102.
18. Raymond, “Islamic city, Arab city,” 5.
19. Lafi, “Building and destroying authenticity in Aleppo,” 206–28.
20. Kosuke Matsubara, “Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998): a Japanese planner devoted to historic cities in the Middle East and North Africa,” Planning Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2016): 391–423.
21. Ibid., 411.
22. Ibid., 212–14.
23. Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,.)1999
24. Hanna Batatu, “Syria’s Muslim Brethren,” in Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi (Eds.), State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan (London: Palgrave, 1988).
25. Tine Gade, “Together all the way? abeyance and co-optation of Sunni networks in Lebanon,” Social Movement Studies 18, no. 1 (2019): 56–77.
26. James A. Paul, Human Rights in Syria (New York: Middle East Watch, .18 ,)1990
27. Jwanah Qudsi, “Rebuilding Old Aleppo: postwar sustainable recovery and urban refugee resettlement”. Master of Urban Planning Thesis, New York University, 2017. www.academia.edu/26963608/Rebuilding_Old_Aleppo_Postwar_Sustainable_Recovery_and_Urban_Refugee_Resettlement.
28. Wajiha Mouhana, “The regime and revolution, dialectics of city and countryside: Aleppo as a case study,” As-safir. Beirut. February 20, 2013.-جدلية-لاريف-والمدينة/3326/2013/02/20/http://assafirarabi.com/ar./لاثورة-والسلطة،
29. Ibid.
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