They dance to Gangnam Style at the daytime disco in Aleppo. The lights strobe as Psy’s 2012 hit blasts out and a young woman with tattooed arms and a ripped T-shirt roars out the lyrics. Dry ice fills the basement of the Dedeman Hotel, which luckily is not experiencing one of Aleppo’s daily power cuts. “We’ve had enough of dying, of having no fun and sitting at home,” said Mahmoud Istanbuli, a student of fine arts. “We want to dance!”
After three years of war, the young people of Aleppo see no future beyond conflict. Their parents frequently forbid them to go out at night, so they dance in the afternoon. “I’ll dance till I die,” said Anas Hasnawi, an engineering student. “That’s what makes me alive. It’s therapy for my soul.”
Aleppo governorate is a key battleground, as “moderate” rebels favoured by the US and Britain are increasingly squeezed between Islamic State (Isis) militants and the regime of Bashar al-Assad. By attacking Isis, the US-led coalition has enabled the Syrian government to concentrate on seizing territory controlled by the very rebels western countries want to support.
The fiercest fighting is around Handarat, just north of Aleppo city, where government troops, backed by Iranian forces and Lebanese Hizbollah militia, took a glass factory and cement plant last week. Footage shot by a cameraman who travelled with regime forces showed a black jihadi flag, probably left by Jabhat al-Nusra, a group linked to al-Qaida. The government’s aim is to cut the road from rural Aleppo into the city and besiege those rebels who remain.
The US and British governments hope that if air strikes push out Isis militants, “moderate rebels” will move into the territory, but the Syrian regime is trying to retake all of Aleppo this winter, to prove that only it can seize and hold the ground.
Since the regime began its assault on rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo last October, many students and their families have been forced to flee their homes. While some have left the country, others have gone to the government-controlled west of Aleppo, which is safer than the rebel-held east. The International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that 1.78 million people have been displaced in Aleppo, the highest number in Syria’s 14 governorates.
Some are reduced to camping out in the ruins of blocks of flats or on building sites. In the suburb of Rouad, four half-built blocks have become temporary home to a collection of destitute families. Like an old-fashioned doll’s house where you can pull open the sides, the buildings have no walls, so passers-by can peer at the occupants.
One day last week, rain was dripping in through the rough concrete ceiling and gathering in puddles. A woman in a blue housecoat swept with futile rhythmic strokes, attempting to prevent rainwater and concrete dust from turning to mud. On the fourth storey, a little girl in a red dress played perilously close to the edge. There were no toilets, no power and no protection from the elements other than plastic sheeting provided by the United Nations.
Mustapha Zakaria Naisa, a kindly-looking man with deep brown eyes and a grey beard, brought his wife and five children to Rouad in September. Before the war he had saved enough from his earnings as a cobbler to buy a flat, but as a government supporter he feared that the rebels would target him, so he moved. War has reduced him to penury.
“I left my home because I was scared,” he said. “The houses in our area had been destroyed. At first I rented a place, but then my money was used up so I went somewhere cheaper. Eventually I had to come here because I had no money left at all.”
His 10-year-old daughter, Kawthar, dressed in a scarlet T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, was keen to show she could still count to 100 in Arabic and 10 in English, even though she had not been to school for three years. Her seven-year-old sister, Israa, should go this year, but Aleppo’s schools are overwhelmed by the destitute and displaced.
Those who still have savings struggle with electricity cuts and water shortages. The power station near Raqqa that used to supply the city was taken by Islamic State (Isis) militants in February, and last weekend fighting around the town of Hama damaged the power lines that had since been supplying Aleppo. The city endured a 36-hour power cut, relieved only for those who can buy power from businessmen operating small generators. Before the war electricity cost an average household about 2,000 Syrian pounds (£7.50) a month – now just keeping the lights on can cost up to 30,000 pounds and it may increase further, as the government has reduced the subsidy on fuel.
“We have learnt to live as our forefathers did, with no modern conveniences,” said a woman shopping for vegetables in a dimly-lit night market.
With limited power, water pumps no longer work, so residents of what used to be Syria’s most prosperous city are reduced to pulling water from wells and transporting it in jerry cans. “I study by candlelight and wash in the mosque every morning before going to college,” said a university student.
The historic heart of Aleppo, destroyed in fighting two years ago, remains a ghostly no man’s land of ruins, the silence interrupted by sporadic gunfire and the occasional mortar. On a rare trip through the devastated ancient souk to the 13th-century citadel, the governor of Aleppo, Mohammad Wahid Aqqad, barely ducked as he walked between barriers of sand and rubble erected to block rebel snipers. Dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, he refused to wear body armour. “I trust in God,” he said. “I will die when it is my time.”
Government forces remain inside the citadel, which used to be Aleppo’s main tourist attraction. “Rebels are in some areas around, but God willing we will soon be rid of them,” said Aqqad, indicating that the front line was less than 100 metres away. Increasingly fragmented groups of rebels controlling the eastern ruins still fire rockets into the west, sometimes hitting the governor’s office beyond the souk.
The domes of the ancient Umayyad mosque have been holed by rockets and little is left of the covered arches that used to contain dozens of shops and small textile manufacturers. A pile of multicoloured buttons, still on their cards, and a few reels of brocade lie abandoned in the rubble.
Government forces have relentlessly bombarded rebel areas, forcing out civilians, but the governor claimed that the people were coming to the regime’s side because the rebels had forced them out. “War is war, but we use bombs only in the area where rebels and Islamic State terrorists are, not where there are civilians,” he said. “There are no longer any civilians in rebel areas, because the rebels forced them to flee to safer places.”
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News
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