"War is in many ways about things that are left behind—people, items, ideas, innocence" http://nyr.kr/12S8jPW In #Syria what is left behind?
12:28 AM - 31 Dec 12 · Details
IN SYRIA, WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND?
Posted by Rania Abouzeid
- d.
His small band of a few men moved through the abandoned homes, looking for food and new places to base their brigade. The neighborhood, Bustan al-Basha, one of the many frontlines in the city of Aleppo, was empty, save for the stray cats rummaging through piles of trash, and the hundreds of rebels who, over the summer, had been drawn by the fighting into the city from the poorer rural towns and villages surrounding it. Only three residents remained, in a place that was once home to thousands. There were signs of civilian life everywhere but no life anywhere, no need to fear an awkward conversation with an occupant. The only civilians the rebels chanced upon were the dead, rotting in their homes.
It’s unsettling, a voyeuristic violation, to walk through people’s homes uninvited—to peer into their lives, their living rooms, their kitchen cabinets. I sat at a dusty kitchen table with “Happy Easter” cushions on its seats, walked through rooms with intricate, gold-lettered Koranic verses adorning the walls. Where were all these people now?
I stood in what was a little girl’s bedroom but was now a sniper’s nest. A fist-sized gunman’s peephole had been punched into the wall above her pine headboard. Her clothes were still in a dresser. A class photo was tossed on her cheap gray Formica desk, along other items; a small purple toy car, a beige teddy bear with a pink bow tie, an abacus, a pink plastic thermos and a pink schoolbag. She’d left some of her toys behind, or perhaps all of them. Did she plead with her parents to bring along her teddy bear?
Which one of the twenty-five children in the photo was she? The children, dressed in identical gray knee-length smocks with red collars for the girls, black collars for the boys, looked to be about six- or seven-years-old. But then, the photo was dated 2008. Is that why it was left behind—maybe for a newer class photo. How did her family decide what to take and what to leave, what was essential and what was merely baggage?
War is in many ways about things that are left behind—people, items, ideas, innocence. It ages children before their time, turns neighbors into enemies (or family), it destroys communities and leaves scars that may or may not show.
The confidently authoritarian Syria that existed before March 15, 2011 has eroded, its brutal decades-old secular pan-Arab regime is fighting for its existence. It will likely eventually go the way of other brutal decades-old secular pan-Arab regimes, like Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, to be replaced by a more religiously conservative, Sunni Muslim power structure of some sort.
While the old Middle East ideologies are being left behind (through greater or lesser degrees of violence), some of their autocratic tendencies haven’t been. Islamist Mohammad Morsi’s Egypt is not a bastion of freedom, Tunisia’s Salafists are trying to impose their conservative views on others and Libya’s many militias are still vying for influence and power. Still, change takes time. Replacing ideas is an evolution (although sometimes, some would say, it’s a devolution), not merely a revolution.
The conflict in Aleppo, meanwhile, grinds on in a battle for streets and street corners. In other parts of the north, as Syria enters a new year of turmoil, the rebels have made greater advances, snatching towns and roads from the Assad regime. But here, the fight is slower, eroding what was once a proud cosmopolis—Syria’s commercial h
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