There’s no safe place left in Aleppo, where heavy fighting between the Syrian army and rebels is shifting from neighborhood to neighborhood. RT’s Lizzie Phelan went to Aleppo’s most active frontline to talk to residents that still remain.
The southern part of the city became a battle front just weeks ago, quickly emerging as the most active in Aleppo. Some 1,070 apartment buildings controlled by government forces are located here, and just opposite them are those controlled by the opposition, mainly consisting of Jaish al-Fateh militants, previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
“They used suicide bombers and they have so many weapons,” a Syrian soldier fighting the rebels here told RT.”We will stop them in this battle.”
The three military academies that the rebels recently seized in a push to regain control of the city are also located here. Syrian medical staff described the recent situation in the neighborhood as the bloodiest fighting since the violence first erupted in Aleppo. Still, residents have stayed, clinging to the place where they have lived for a long time, as RT’s crew found out.
Walking through the home of one of the families, an RT cameraman filmed bits of shrapnel scattered across the terrace and holes in the shutters left by bullets, as Phelan described what she saw as “a deadly place to call home.” The family that occupies the building did not wish to be filmed, but told RT off-camera that, despite the sound of explosions and shooting heard outside, it’s not the worse they have seen over the last six years.
Before the fighting began a little over three weeks ago, this neighborhood was one of the safer parts of Aleppo, and many buildings here were used for housing refugees displaced from the city’s other neighborhoods. Some of them still live here, with no place else to go.
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“We were refugees from the Karm al-Myasser area close to Aleppo airport. We fled from there three-and-a-half years ago,” one of the inhabitants told RT.
The boy Ahmed says that some of his friends left the neighborhood and went to “safer areas like al Furgan and Salah Eddin,” but as Phelan noted, these areas can hardly be considered safe, as Salah Eddin was one of Aleppo’s most gruesome battlegrounds, and is largely in ruins after battles between the Syrian government forces and the rebels.
“Before the situation was better. I used to go to work, but now I can’t. I can only go out for two hours, then I have to come back,” Ahmed complains.
The children hardly ever go outside now that there is fighting here. Five-year-old Safer told Phelan that all she does is tidy the house and play with her friends indoors. But the children – as children do – remain hopeful that one day the sounds of battle will cease and peace will return to their neighborhood.
“First of all, I will clean the street. Then I will call all my friends and tell them to come back so we can play together, play football in the square, it will be amazing,” Ahmed says with tears in his eyes, dreaming of the day the war will be over
