The Fight for Aleppo:
In Syria’s largest city, a sustained and pitched battle between rebels and the Syrian army has left the city in ruins.
ALEPPO, Syria — Inside the classrooms where they once studied, the boys darted like a pack. Their banging and clanking could be heard for a city block.
The playground outside had been hit by a Syrian Air Force airstrike, which fractured the school’s walls. Now the children were smashing the furniture, prying off wooden desktops and bench seats, rushing away with what they could.
The Isam al-Nadri School for Boys was being dismantled for the firewood it contained. One sixth grader, Ahmed, clutching the kindling he had made by ransacking a room, offered an irreducible argument for looting his own school. “I want heat,” he said.
Winter is descending on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the bloodied stage for an urban battle, now running into its sixth month, between rebels and the military of President Bashar al-Assad.
As temperatures drop and the weakened government’s artillery thunders on, Aleppo is administered by no one and slipping into disaster. Front-line neighborhoods are rubble. Most of the city’s districts have had no electricity and little water for weeks. All of Aleppo suffers from shortages of oil, food, medicine, doctors and gas.
Diseases are spreading. Parks and courtyards are being defoliated for firewood, turning streets once lined with trees into avenues bordered by stumps. Months’ worth of trash is piled high, often beside bread lines where hundreds of people wait for a meager stack of loaves.
One of the Middle East’s beautiful and historic cities is being forced by scarcity and violence into a bitter new shape. Overlaying it all is a mix of fatigue and distrust, the sentiments of a population divided in multiple ways.
Aleppo’s citizens scavenge and seethe. And along with the sectarian passions of civil war, some residents express yearnings for starkly opposite visions of the future: either for a return of the relative stability of the Assad government or for the promises of Islamic rule.
Others see a grim hope, calling the tearing apart of their society a period that one day will be remembered as this ancient city’s ultimate test.
“We left high salaries, we left our jobs, we left our rank in society,” said Dr. Ammar Diar Bakerly, who directs medical care in the city’s rebel-held east. “We left everything to get our dignity. This is the price we have to pay, and it is a cheap price to get our freedom from the tyrant.”
Not everyone shares these revolutionary views. “We come every morning to the clinic asking for medicine, but they don’t offer any,” said Johair Iman Mustafa, a house painter and taxi driver with no work, who spotted a visitor and approached in a rage. “We go to the bakery for hours, but there is no bread and they kick us.”
“Before the revolution,” said Mr. Mustafa, a Sunni who had been no supporter of Mr. Assad’s Alawite-led government, “it was much better.”
Supplies Dwindle, Prices Rise
For most of Syria’s 21-month uprising, Aleppo, a commercial and government center built around its historic Old City, was spared the battles engulfing the country.
That changed in July when the Free Syrian Army, or F.S.A., as many rebels call themselves, entered Aleppo and opened urban fronts.
The government rushed in much-needed army units from elsewhere, turning to heavier weapons in a bid to retain control of a city that, if lost, would change Mr. Assad’s self-assured narrative. The war’s largest battle yet was joined.
Five months on, the government’s gambit has failed. Even with air support and artillery batteries firing relentlessly, Mr. Assad’s military has yielded ground. In roughly half the city, rebels move about openly.
From the outset, Aleppo’s population, its loyalties split, was stuck between forces. Disorganized rebel groups had started a battle they had little prospect to win swiftly. The army fought back in part with a collective-punishment model. Foreign fighters began to trickle in, stalking the front and talking of jihad.
