While the survivors of Aleppo on Tuesday marked the 11th anniversary of The Syrian revolution has become a civil war, many year look in shock that Ukrainians face familiar horrors: Bombardment, brutal siege and flight from their homes.
At the end of 2016, Syria government the forces had sealed off Rebel-held eastern Aleppo half, with 270,000 people inside, and for months, they and Russian warplanes reduced it to rubble. Food was scarce so many mostly survived off one meals per day. While Afraa Hashem, one of them think back to live the siege of Aleppo, she remembers how everyone was inventive.
One day, son elder son Wisam, 11 at the time, asked out of nowhere: “Mom, on can eat fish?”
Her three children don’t even really have like fish. But when you have almost nothing, you rate even things you don’t have like, she recalls. Unwilling to give in to despair, Hashem fried up moldy bread, found coriander, garlic and Aleppo red pepper flakes and told them it was tilapia. Together they all pretended it was fish – the kids even said they could taste it.
“It was not just me, but everyone women in Aleppo was making these inventions to feed their children,” she says.
In the war in Syria, Russia helped President Bashar Assad government take over with a ruthless strategy. One by onethey besieged the areas held by the opposition, bombarding them and starving them down to the populationthat is ability hold out collapsed. Headquarters of Aleppo was among the most brutal. Aleppo was Syria’s most populous cityfamous for son unique food of elaborate dishes and its millennial old town.
When war broke out, his eastern districts fought off the government for four years, overflowing with revolutionary fervor. But almost six month of seat reduced many of is to empty the rubble, its population dispersed or dead.
In Ukraine, a similar siege is underway for almost two weeks on The harbor city of Mariupol, where dozens of thousands glean for food and shelter under Russian bombardment. The fear is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will extend a Syrian-style siege strategy across Ukraine.
Now in London with son husband and childrenHachem said she stood in solidarity with Ukraine since first daytime of Russia invasion.
“Many of people ask if I’m angry that the world sympathize more with Ukraine than it did with Syria. I tell them that I don’t care if people sympathize more. I care that they are victims,” she said.
In one corner of Syria still outside government control, another Aleppo survivor, Abdulkafi Alhamdo, is also trying to log in with Ukraine.
He lives in opposition-held province of Idlib and operates as a literature professor in the neighboring town under Turkish control of Azaz.
In class, “I’m still connected with Big Brother in ‘1984’ by George Orwell novel to Putin, both in Syria and now in Ukraine,” he said.
Alhamdo printed two Ukrainian flags to wave alongside Syrian revolution flags at a local protest in Idlib marking the anniversary this week.
When the Syrian conflict started in 2011, Hashem worked as a school principal and activist. His hopes for change in Syrian Rose with opposition gains, including its capture of Eastern Aleppo half from government. Hashem worked with the local council that manages city and helped organize protests.
Above next years, Russian and government warplanes increasingly bombarded eastern Aleppo as they battled rebel forces in the countryside. Hashem moved son school in a basement and turned dark rooms into classrooms and shelters. She opened a theater there, writing rooms for students to perform.
With the fighting getting worse, the ordinary life she once had has grown more remote. In the morning she did pass by the hill that separates it of east of Aleppo from government- held west of Aleppo.
It was as impassable as the Berlin Wall, she recalls. If you got too close, the snipers would shoot you. But she wanted hear cars, anyone sound the other side it would bring the memory of friends and parents who lived there.
“I always wondered, ‘What is life like in this second universe?'”
His universe fell into complete hell when the siege was imposed on ballast in July 2016.
Eastern Aleppo has been sealed off, with almost no supplies in. Russian and government the bombardments have destroyed everything, including hospitals and schools. The residential blocks were left in ruins.
Early on, one of Hashem’s students were killed. She quit the school theater. The few gardens in the neighborhood become cemeteries. The drugs ran out. the sound of the explosions were constant. Hashem’s apartment building was shelled many times before and during the siege, and they moved often.
With no electricity and little fuel, residents have turned to “plastic gasoline”, extracting fuel from plastic bottles and containers. bad for the generators and gave off a toxic smell. But it helped to generate enough electricity for people load car Battery, mobile phones and small LED lights.
Without gas for the kitchen, families collected furniture and leftovers of firewood from the ever increasing number of bombed-out buildings.
Prices have skyrocketed. There were no fruits and few vegetables. Flour was almost impossible to find, so Hashem and other families made bread by grinding white beans.
Like the cold of winter set no scrap wood was needed for heat too. Her children missed the sahleb (or salep), a sweet and comforting drink in winter favorite across the Middle East. This is made tubers of an orchid, not found during the siege.
So Hesham again improvised. She tapped into her precious reserve of flour, porridge with water and sugar”, and it was like you drink sahleb but in another way.”
A little after, in at the end of December 2016, she was among dozens of thousands of residents who agreed to leave under an evacuation agreement. She traveled to opposition-held northwestern Syria, then to Turkey.
On her first night in a flat in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, she watched the wash machine spinning for the first time in years – and cried.
Hesham took her children in a shopping center, towards the “promised land” of the food court. “We bought all kinds of the food we dreamed of of while eating. Pizzas, burgers, chicken nuggets, fish and chips. All of this.”
Today, a Syrian regime soldier lives in son old homeparents again in the city tell him, reflecting a government tendency to confiscate property after battles.
Iman Khaled Aboud, 40 year-old widow, also left Aleppo in the same evacuation on a foggy day in december with snow and biting cold, similar to temperatures in Ukraine now.
She described seeing Russian troops for the first time that the evacuation buses passed through the points control – after months of be at the reception of Russian strikes. His son and she husband were both killed in a Russian strike, she said. Under the bombardments, she and her family had to move 15 times during the siege.
Aboud said she hopes Ukrainians don’t have to go through what she did. But, she says, “I would advise them to stock up on food.”
In February 2020, Hashem was invited to attend the British Academy Film Awards for his involvement in the award-winner movie”For Sama”, which follows the birth of a child during the siege of Aleppo and in good place features of hashem family. In Britain, she was able to apply for asylum.
For the birthday of war, Hashem plans attend a demonstration in London against the syrian governmentwhere they go also raise banners against Russia invasion of Ukraine.
“I want for show the world that our disaster and experience could be transferred to another country.
While the survivors of Aleppo on Tuesday marked the 11th anniversary of The Syrian revolution has become a civil war, many year look in shock that Ukrainians face familiar horrors: Bombardment, brutal siege and flight from their homes.
At the end of 2016, Syria government the forces had sealed off Rebel-held eastern Aleppo half, with 270,000 people inside, and for months, they and Russian warplanes reduced it to rubble. Food was scarce so many mostly survived off one meals per day. While Afraa Hashem, one of them think back to live the siege of Aleppo, she remembers how everyone was inventive.
One day, son elder son Wisam, 11 at the time, asked out of nowhere: “Mom, on can eat fish?”
Her three children don’t even really have like fish. But when you have almost nothing, you rate even things you don’t have like, she recalls. Unwilling to give in to despair, Hashem fried up moldy bread, found coriander, garlic and Aleppo red pepper flakes and told them it was tilapia. Together they all pretended it was fish – the kids even said they could taste it.
“It was not just me, but everyone women in Aleppo was making these inventions to feed their children,” she says.
In the war in Syria, Russia helped President Bashar Assad government take over with a ruthless strategy. One by onethey besieged the areas held by the opposition, bombarding them and starving them down to the populationthat is ability hold out collapsed. Headquarters of Aleppo was among the most brutal. Aleppo was Syria’s most populous cityfamous for son unique food of elaborate dishes and its millennial old town.
When war broke out, his eastern districts fought off the government for four years, overflowing with revolutionary fervor. But almost six month of seat reduced many of is to empty the rubble, its population dispersed or dead.
In Ukraine, a similar siege is underway for almost two weeks on The harbor city of Mariupol, where dozens of thousands glean for food and shelter under Russian bombardment. The fear is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will extend a Syrian-style siege strategy across Ukraine.
Now in London with son husband and childrenHachem said she stood in solidarity with Ukraine since first daytime of Russia invasion.
“Many of people ask if I’m angry that the world sympathize more with Ukraine than it did with Syria. I tell them that I don’t care if people sympathize more. I care that they are victims,” she said.
In one corner of Syria still outside government control, another Aleppo survivor, Abdulkafi Alhamdo, is also trying to log in with Ukraine.
He lives in opposition-held province of Idlib and operates as a literature professor in the neighboring town under Turkish control of Azaz.
In class, “I’m still connected with Big Brother in ‘1984’ by George Orwell novel to Putin, both in Syria and now in Ukraine,” he said.
Alhamdo printed two Ukrainian flags to wave alongside Syrian revolution flags at a local protest in Idlib marking the anniversary this week.
When the Syrian conflict started in 2011, Hashem worked as a school principal and activist. His hopes for change in Syrian Rose with opposition gains, including its capture of Eastern Aleppo half from government. Hashem worked with the local council that manages city and helped organize protests.
Above next years, Russian and government warplanes increasingly bombarded eastern Aleppo as they battled rebel forces in the countryside. Hashem moved son school in a basement and turned dark rooms into classrooms and shelters. She opened a theater there, writing rooms for students to perform.
With the fighting getting worse, the ordinary life she once had has grown more remote. In the morning she did pass by the hill that separates it of east of Aleppo from government- held west of Aleppo.
It was as impassable as the Berlin Wall, she recalls. If you got too close, the snipers would shoot you. But she wanted hear cars, anyone sound the other side it would bring the memory of friends and parents who lived there.
“I always wondered, ‘What is life like in this second universe?'”
His universe fell into complete hell when the siege was imposed on ballast in July 2016.
Eastern Aleppo has been sealed off, with almost no supplies in. Russian and government the bombardments have destroyed everything, including hospitals and schools. The residential blocks were left in ruins.
Early on, one of Hashem’s students were killed. She quit the school theater. The few gardens in the neighborhood become cemeteries. The drugs ran out. the sound of the explosions were constant. Hashem’s apartment building was shelled many times before and during the siege, and they moved often.
With no electricity and little fuel, residents have turned to “plastic gasoline”, extracting fuel from plastic bottles and containers. bad for the generators and gave off a toxic smell. But it helped to generate enough electricity for people load car Battery, mobile phones and small LED lights.
Without gas for the kitchen, families collected furniture and leftovers of firewood from the ever increasing number of bombed-out buildings.
Prices have skyrocketed. There were no fruits and few vegetables. Flour was almost impossible to find, so Hashem and other families made bread by grinding white beans.
Like the cold of winter set no scrap wood was needed for heat too. Her children missed the sahleb (or salep), a sweet and comforting drink in winter favorite across the Middle East. This is made tubers of an orchid, not found during the siege.
So Hesham again improvised. She tapped into her precious reserve of flour, porridge with water and sugar”, and it was like you drink sahleb but in another way.”
A little after, in at the end of December 2016, she was among dozens of thousands of residents who agreed to leave under an evacuation agreement. She traveled to opposition-held northwestern Syria, then to Turkey.
On her first night in a flat in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, she watched the wash machine spinning for the first time in years – and cried.
Hesham took her children in a shopping center, towards the “promised land” of the food court. “We bought all kinds of the food we dreamed of of while eating. Pizzas, burgers, chicken nuggets, fish and chips. All of this.”
Today, a Syrian regime soldier lives in son old homeparents again in the city tell him, reflecting a government tendency to confiscate property after battles.
Iman Khaled Aboud, 40 year-old widow, also left Aleppo in the same evacuation on a foggy day in december with snow and biting cold, similar to temperatures in Ukraine now.
She described seeing Russian troops for the first time that the evacuation buses passed through the points control – after months of be at the reception of Russian strikes. His son and she husband were both killed in a Russian strike, she said. Under the bombardments, she and her family had to move 15 times during the siege.
Aboud said she hopes Ukrainians don’t have to go through what she did. But, she says, “I would advise them to stock up on food.”
In February 2020, Hashem was invited to attend the British Academy Film Awards for his involvement in the award-winner movie”For Sama”, which follows the birth of a child during the siege of Aleppo and in good place features of hashem family. In Britain, she was able to apply for asylum.
For the birthday of war, Hashem plans attend a demonstration in London against the syrian governmentwhere they go also raise banners against Russia invasion of Ukraine.
“I want for show the world that our disaster and experience could be transferred to another country.