---
type: Place
title: Aleppo
description: Northern Syria's great city, months after the government fell — an abandoned Assad officers' club, a market built on cleared rubble, and money-changers stacking cash in public with nobody touching it.
tags: [aleppo, syria, conflict, ruins, citadel, markets, hope]
coordinates: {lat: 36.1992, lng: 37.1637}
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Aleppo

The major city of northern [Syria](/countries/syria.md), and the end of Harry's
hitchhike from [Damascus](/places/damascus.md) via [Homs](/places/homs.md).

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](/people/kieran.md) 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](/videos/wF17Hx5ul7o.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF17Hx5ul7o