Skip to main content

WHAT ALEPPO IS


“What is Aleppo?” asked third party libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on nationwide US television. And everyone who is aware of the horrendous human drama unfolding in Syria gasped and wrote him off as too ignorant to run for dogcatcher let alone president of the most powerful nation on earth and leader of the Western world.
US Presidential candidate Gary Johnson
Devastated by the Syrian War over the course of the past five years, Aleppo will very likely be, for all intents and purposes, leveled within the next two months, under constant air attacks by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and those of his Russian ally and overlord Vladimir Putin. While many may know where Aleppo lies in the bitter war between Assad and nationalist rebels and in the proxy wars of regional and worldwide rivals, fewer know what Aleppo means in terms of world history and culture.
Possibly in existence since as far back as the 6th millennium before the Christian era, it has been inhabited as a city since at least the 3rd millennium BC and was a noted commercial and military center throughout history up to World War I. Its longevity can be attributed to its strategic location as a trading post at the mid-point between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). It was also one of the principal points of interest on the legendary Silk Road, an ancient network of international trade routes that connected East and West and wended their way from China to the Mediterranean Sea.
Aleppo before the war
The ancient city’s decline in power first came with the building of the Suez Canal in the mid-19th century, which diverted trade to sea routes instead of overland. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent carving up of the Middle Eastern region by the victors of World War I saw the northern part of the city’s sphere of influence ceded to Turkey, along with its rail connections with Iraq. In the World War II era the city’s access to the sea was also ceded to Turkey and it became, for all intents and purposes, isolated.
Aleppo today
The positive result of this isolation was that its extraordinary wealth of history and culture—historic landmarks, Medieval architecture and traditional Muslim heritage—was well preserve and lovingly restored. Five years before the Syrian War began, Aleppo was named the “Capital of Islamic Culture 2006”.
World leaders have stood by and watched as this ancient gem has been razed to the ground or, in some cases, have actively participated in its destruction, while turning deaf ears to the cries of its people who have become martyrs to worldwide indifference and sectorial interests.
What is Aleppo? A symbol. A tragic loss for Syria, for global culture and history, for the world at large, and for the cause of peace.   



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A TOAST TO A BETTER WORLD

When I was young, I fancied myself a hippie. I also considered myself an artist. I was a         musician and a painter. What I bought into wasn’t the psychedelic drug culture that grew up around the hippie movement, but the “flower power” philosophy on which that movement was based, and which created a veritable cultural revolution that caught on around the world. It was a philosophy that promoted everything that should be the accepted norm in the world—peace, harmony, empathy, cooperation. Above all, love. The hippies were seen by the establishment as “crazy kids”. But the learning moment that the hippie movement offered to the world came through its opening of minds of all ages not only to the possibility, but also to the appropriateness of its philosophy of love and kindness. In that context, it wasn’t the hippies who were “crazy”, but the establishment, the sick societies that sold war, division, racism, repression and violence as the nor...
Post a Comment
Read more

SYRIA'S QUEST FOR DEMOCRACY AND THE COST OF SUPERPOWER HYPOCRISY

“This is where the revolution happens first,” say Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab in their book, Burning Country (Pluto Press 2016), “before the guns and the political calculations, before even the demonstrations—in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and newly unfettered words.” The tragedy of the so-called “civil war” in Syria has become so unspeakably monumental and monstrous that, for the public at large worldwide, it has distilled into merely a set of grim statistics, a current titleholder for World’s Worst Conflict, the source of the bulk of Europe’s migration crisis, but unimaginable and, sadder still, unthinkable for the majority in terms of the horror taking place there on a daily basis. It is a country where the superpower-imposed family of dictators who have ruled for over four decades had, until 2011, stilled all opposition and autocratically governed generations brought up resigned to living mute. According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, “Syria...
Post a Comment
Read more

STEVE BANNON: AN AMERICAN RASPUTIN

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101 st Airborne Division. According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the...
Post a Comment
Read more