Scenes From Inside Aleppo

Marwan Hisham, Vanity Fair: Scenes from Inside Aleppo: How Life Has Been Transformed by Rebel Rule

A Syrian writer revisits the city he attended college in, with sketches by Molly Crabapple.

I first moved to Aleppo 10 years ago. At that time, the city was the world for me: the glorious past and the present, the bitter and the sweet. I attended university in mid-Aleppo’s wealthy neighborhoods. To get there, I took the bus from my apartment in the crowded Al-Myassar, one of Aleppo’s poorest slums. We rode by the ancient gates of Bab Al-Hadid and Bab Al-Nasr, through which the Silk Road once curved. Old Aleppo’s walls had vanished over the years, but its gates survived as if to remind residents of their history: the city may have been destroyed before, by Mongols and by earthquakes, but every time it got up on its feet again.

WNU Editor: The above video is an Al Jazeera documentary done earlier this year on what the Syrian civil war has done to Aleppo.