Inside Aleppo, the city Assad left to rot as a lesson in the price of rising up | Syria

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 had for years refused to lay down their weapons, 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.

“It’s OK for us to go in but no one else, it would be dangerous,” said Abu Hassan, 46, a resident of the Kurdish-majority neighbourhood, returning home from the old city. “We are back to living in uncertain times.”

Aleppo, a cosmopolitan and ancient merchant city on the silk road between the Mediterranean port of Antioch, now Antakya in Turkey, and the great Euphrates, which flows to the Persian Gulf, has survived calamity and catastrophe in its 8,000-year history: earthquakes, plagues and millennia of wars between Arab, Turkic, Persian and Christian kingdoms.

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.

“I can’t believe I am back,” said Khaled Khatib, 29, a member of the White Helmets civil defence service, which throughout the war rescued people caught up in Syrian and Russian airstrikes on opposition-held areas. He had left Aleppo in 2015, certain he would never be able to go home again.

By the summer of 2012, after Assad had cracked down on peaceful Arab spring protests, leading the opposition to mount an armed insurrection, Free Syrian Army factions had seized control of the eastern half of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city and its economic heart, long seen as the key to control of the country.

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.

When government forces cut off east Aleppo’s last supply line in the summer of 2016, the siege tightened and the regime clawed back the city block by block, forcing the last of the remaining civilians and fighters to flee to rural areas under opposition control by the end of the year. Assad’s successful reconquest of the city, the last major urban centre outside his control, was widely seen as the death knell of the dreams of the Arab spring.

Today, entire neighbourhoods in the east and south of the city are still rubble, their residents long gone. The destruction was left as a silent reminder of the price to be paid for opposing the regime. Bodies buried under the mounds of rebar and concrete have never been retrieved. Just a handful of apartments are still intact, laundry and plants on the balconies the only gasps of colour amid the grey.

Streets surrounding Aleppo’s 13th-century citadel and the once thriving commercial centre of the west side are not as badly damaged but they are quiet. Many shuttered shops have clearly been closed for years, and pollution from the locally refined diesel that powers many homes and cars has turned the streets greasy and black. After suffering through the oppression of the regime and Islamist diktats of some rebel groups, almost none of the women the Guardian met wanted to talk or give their names.

And yet, with Assad gone, there is a startling fresh hope that a new Syria can be built on the ruins of a countrywide battleground. Across the city, the three red stars and green stripe of the opposition flag are everywhere, carried by schoolchildren and decorating shop windows and car bonnets.

Food and fuel prices in Aleppo soared in the immediate aftermath of the rebel offensive at the end of November but have now settled at a better rate, as goods and produce from Turkey and the HTS stronghold of Idlib flood the markets. The powerful sweetness of clementines for sale floats over the smell of refuse.

Bashar Hakami, 28, hawking apples, winter citrus and the last of the year’s pomegranates, said he was already seeing positive changes in the city. “The prices are much better and there’s no rationing of bread or fuel any more,” he said. “You can do what you want.”

Aleppo was the first target of a surprise offensive led by HTS, an Islamist group that wrested control of nearby Idlib province and the surrounding countryside from other factions at the end of 2018. Even as the rest of the world had quietly accepted that Assad had won the war, for years they planned a counter-offensive, luring the regime’s hollowed-out forces and demoralised conscripts into underestimating their intentions. With Assad’s allies Russia, Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah bogged down in wars with Ukraine and Israel, they took their chance. Less than two weeks later, Assad fled the country and the Syrian opposition flag was raised over the capital, Damascus.

Syrian government troops were caught unawares and quickly overwhelmed; some units fled, and hastily gathered reinforcements could not mount a coordinated defence. At the Basel roundabout on Aleppo’s western outskirts, an airstrike killed at least 15 civilians; blood and diesel are still visible on the steps below what used to be a statue of Assad’s brother.

Some civilians fled and others poured on to the streets in celebration, toppling statues of Assad and his family, tearing down the ubiquitous regime flags and graffitiing the myriad pictures of Bashar and his father, Hafez, who seized power in 1970 and died in 2000. Almost overnight, more than 50 years of the family’s brutal police state, and more than 13 years of internecine civil war, came to an end.

“I have a green card in the US. I could leave anytime I wanted,” said Joseph Fanoun, 68, the owner of an antiques shop in the Christian neighbourhood of Azaziyeh. “But I didn’t, because I love my home and my city and I knew we would be free one day.” Fanoun and the Father Christmas figures outside his door were decked out in Syrian opposition scarves.

Not everyone is as happy. Mahmous Farash, 50, the owner of a breakfast restaurant, had left Aleppo in 2013 for Cairo, afraid for his family’s future as the uprising against Assad morphed into a sectarian nightmare funded and influenced by foreign powers.

“I came back six months ago. Now I am not sure it was the right decision,” he said, nervously eyeing the three Islamist fighters who had arrived for fatteh and ful – fried bread with chickpeas and yoghurt, and fava beans – on a sunny, freezing morning. One repeatedly told a woman inside to cover her hair.

At the fire station in Karm al-Jabal, the White Helmets civil defence service has moved in, cleaning up and repairing rescue vehicles and fire trucks that the regime had let turn to rust. Several of the team had worked at the station as firefighters before the war; they have been reunited in circumstances that would have been difficult for anyone to imagine just a few short weeks ago.

“There is a lot of work to do,” said Khatib, the youngest of the group. “I feel like Aleppo is an open wound. But we cannot miss this chance.”