Near Aleppo’s ancient citadel, the scent of rose and jasmine rises from the rubble of a half-destroyed shop covered in bullet holes. Months ago it was a battleground, but for years before that it was a perfumery, and war has not changed its smell.
For centuries Aleppo’s souk, its alleyway marketplace, was world-famous. The city was one of the westernmost points on the Silk Road and in both modern and ancient times it was full of haggling customers, canny businessmen, donkeys, and piles of goods – pistachios, za’atar and soap – from across the region.
It was a rich city and for the most part its residents lived well. None of this is now true. The west of the city, which stayed in government hands, is still functioning but many are scraping by on remittances from abroad and salaries worth a fraction of their pre-war value. The eastern side, formerly rebel-held, lies in ruins after a largely Russian-led bombing campaign.
“If the battle was still going on, we’d probably be eating those weeds,” 71-year-old Abu Abdou says, pointing at what looks like rapeseed, growing amid the ruined buildings around him.
He and his friends sit on broken plastic chairs outside the oldest mosque in the heart of Aleppo’s old city. The tiny mosque, named al-Tuteh, or the Mosque of the Mulberry Tree, commemorates the spot where it is claimed that after the surrender of the Romans in 637 the victorious Muslim army stopped to pray. It is, mercifully, mostly intact.
The destruction of the east may not have dragged the remaining Aleppians to the level of the world’s very poorest people, but many were used to air conditioning, cooking with hundreds of ingredients, and good educations. They fell from a great height.
Six years after the uprising against Bashar al-Assad began, there is no end in sight to the Syrian war. In the north, Syria and Russia are carrying out attacks by air, and in Raqqa dozens of civilians have died in US-led strikes aimed at Islamic State.
Fighting still rages in the Aleppo suburbs, but in the east of the city those who survived the bombing and did not seek refuge or evacuate are trying to return to normal life.
After dark in al-Shaar, when the rest of the east Aleppo neighbourhood is pitch black, a 14-year-old sits in the doorway of a shop offering toys and water pipes, surrounded by bright generator-powered lights. He says the shop is his, and spreads his body out in his plastic chair, trying to look proprietorial.
Nearby 65-year-old Abu Ahmad is selling sweet pastries. A few months before the battle was won by the Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian government, a piece of shrapnel tore his belly open. At the hospital opposite his shop, he says, staff thought there was no hope for him and left him on the ground to die. Luckily. one doctor noticed him and saved his life.
“I knew I would live. I was full of hope,” he says. When asked what gave him hope when so many were dying, he begins to cry. “I have three girls, teenage girls. I hoped to live and see them grow up. When you have girls, you have everything in life. You are rich.”
Five months after he lost a kidney and part of his liver, Abu Ahmad spends his days stuffing dough with nuts and cheese. “We are fighting for our lives, we have to open. I have to work so that we can eat.”
He measures the psychological recovery of his fellow Aleppians by the number of pastries he sells. “If someone’s coming to buy sweets, it means he’s happy. If he’s sad, he won’t think about eating sweets.
“Aleppo will always be Aleppo, forever. The stones were meant to be destroyed at this time. But we’ll rebuild them. If we are stubborn enough to do what we have to do, this will be a hospital again,” he continues, pointing at the hospital where he was left for dead. But the doctors and nurses supported the opposition, Abu Ahmad says, and will not return.
Speaking to those left in east Aleppo gives only a fragment of the picture. Those who were forced to leave are not there to tell their stories, and it is very difficult to judge the honesty of those who stayed. The Syrian government and its allies are in control of Aleppo’s present and to an extent its past too.
“I don’t want to say anything bad about the government,” one woman says nervously, when asked about life in rebel-held Aleppo.
It’s not just Aleppo’s stones that need rebuilding. Seven-year-old Fatima, who lost her leg during the siege, describes how she had been playing outside when she was hit by a mortar. “I remember everything,” she says.
She has been made a prosthetic leg made by a physical rehabilitation centre run by the Red Cross (ICRC), and is learning to walk again. A technician helps her put her new prosthesis on, and watches her gait as she bounces up and down the room, looking almost carefree.
Her Turkish mother, Bahia Sulaiman, is surviving on money her family sends her until she can get back home. She blames her ex-husband for her daughter’s injury.
“I told him: ‘See what happened? Because you didn’t get us out of here, our daughter is hurt.’ I left him because he’s the one who made me come to Aleppo and stay here.”
Many here live day-to-day. The bombed-out city is still faced with a dire humanitarian crisis and those moving back to the east have no electricity and little security. They depend on charity handouts to eat, cope with huge damage to their homes and have hardly any money.
Many returned to find their houses looted, something government officials blame on the rebels, while others say that it was done by the Syrian army in the weeks they spent “clearing” the east of unexploded ordnance after the evacuation.
“We are addressing a situation of pure emergency,” said George Comninos, the head of Aleppo’s branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “[People] think that now that the guns are silent in Aleppo city, everything is solved. On the contrary.
“People are thinking about reconstruction, but we’re far away from reconstruction. Here we have to first address the most basic humanitarian needs.”
Even in this situation, though, people are trying to make something out of whatever they have. The entrepreneurial attitude handed down over millennia is still alive.
“You don’t know the Aleppian people,” says Intisar Abu Saleh, a radiologist who helps run Alta’Alouf, a local charity providing aid to refugees and people living in the east. “We’ve had six years of this, and they’re living. They like life, they like humour. Even in this dark situation, they try to live with very little support.”
The Mosque of the Mulberry Tree has been Abu Ahmad and his friends’ favourite meeting place for as long as they can remember. They used to be surrounded by the thrum of business, worship, tourism and family life. Now, the mosque’s stubby minaret is damaged, and its stones bear graffiti painted over in black.
Occasionally someone cycles by. Sometimes, a large family of children living nearby comes to see if the mosque is open. Mostly, the only sound is the men’s quiet chatter.
But life in Aleppo goes on, says Abu Ahmad. “We’ve always sat outside this mosque, so here we are now