Aleppo

The major city of northern Syria, and the end of Harry’s hitchhike from Damascus via Homs.

The thing that shocks him here is scale. He knew there would be ruins — you see them in videos — but what he did not expect is that the destruction is not in pockets. It is everywhere, in every city, including the centres of Damascus and Aleppo. He calls it mind-blowing and desperately sad.

The abandoned officers’ club

A side quest, and the best sequence in the Syria cluster. An Assad-era officers’ club, abandoned since the government fell four or five months earlier, standing open behind a locked gate and a knocked-down wall. Harry was told about it by his friends Kieran and Colin, who put it on the left of the Aleppo sign.

What’s inside: the old flag still up, a destroyed portrait, graffiti, the new flag painted over things, and a building comprehensively looted. Clothing on the floor, gas masks, and a dark basement Harry goes into anyway — more worried, he says, about the rats than about anyone guarding it.

His reading of it: Aleppo was one of the first cities taken, nobody expected the collapse, and people left in a hurry without their belongings. Whoever got here first got everything.

What people say

Harry talks to a lot of people here and reports something he’s careful about: every single person, on camera and off, says good things about the change, and he flags the possibility that they feel they have to.

The fullest answer comes from a Russian-Syrian man who moved here in 2019 and gives it partly off camera:

• The main difference is feeling free, and being able to do what you want.
• It is safe, but not 100%. He revises his own figure downward mid-sentence, and explains: people from the old government are still hiding, and still killing, and the new government is trying to find them.
• Stick to the main cities. Damascus is fine; away from them there are still problems.
• On sanctions, his hope is that they go, and that the US and others stay with Syria rather than leaving it — and that it will take time.

Living without a state

The observation Harry keeps returning to and the most interesting thing on this page. The rebel forces are effectively the government and the country is largely self-governing — and there is no looting, no disorder and, as far as he can tell, almost no crime.

• Money changers stack cash in the open in public squares, and nobody takes it. His phrase for his own reaction is his “monkey Western brain” expecting a theft that doesn’t come.
• A second-hand market in the middle of the city — clothes, toys, electronics — built on ground cleared of rubble, selling on the things a wealthier country would throw away.

His conclusion, said plainly: if you removed the police and the government from the UK, it would be far worse than this. He reads Syrians getting on with life without a state as evidence that they never had one that cared about them.

The citadel

Impressive from the outside, and closed — Harry assumes structural damage. The area around it is where people sit, drink and smoke shisha, and he describes it as people simply being glad to be free.

Practical

• The average wage is $80 a month. Food is cheap; everything else is not.
• Petrol is in crisis across the country — smuggled from Lebanon and sold at the roadside in plastic bottles.

Source

• Hitchhiking with Rebels through the New Syria — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF17Hx5ul7o