The war for Aleppo had stayed far enough away from their home in the centre of the city for Umm Khaled and her family to hope that, somehow, they could survive it unscathed.
That changed one week ago when bombs, which had long been directed away from Aleppo’s ancient heart and the totemic citadel nearby, crashed into the building next to them.
“We were eating dinner,” said Khaled inside a tent in a Turkish refugee camp where she and 17 other relatives arrived on Tuesday. “Then the bombs hit. Dust, concrete, steel fell on the meal in front of us. “That’s when we knew we had to leave.” Khaled and her family are among the few of nearly 30,000 refugees who fled Aleppo and the countryside to the north who have made it to Turkey. The rest have spent the past week camped out near the border gates, most too poor to even contemplate the 10-hour trek across the mountains for which Khaled’s family members each paid $500.
The family spoke of a city that had already disintegrated before the Russian blitz launched during international peace talks two weeks ago, and which since has become one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Stalking the edges of the city and the ruined towns nearby are a myriad of forces with disparate loyalties which are now more difficult to comprehend or navigate than at any point during the war.
With Russia agreeing with the US to aim for a cessation of hostilities starting in one week, the few opposition groups that remain inside the city say that by then little will be left to fight for. And, in any event, there is little faith within an exhausted opposition that world powers can orchestrate a political outcome while military muscle is prevailing. “The regime is advancing quite quickly,” said Bahar al-Halabi, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) member inside Aleppo. “It is an obvious collaboration between the regime, the Kurds and the Russians. Now we have to fight three giants at the same time. We have very little left. Nothing can change things now. I can’t lie and say that the position of the FSA is strong.
“The regime is not interested in a political solution unless they get everything they want on the ground. They might agree to a ceasefire, but they will use it to surround us.”
All those who fled Aleppo and made it to Turkey spoke of a sense of defeat and abandonment. “We have been warning of this day for two years,” said Ahmed Othman, another new arrival in the camp, one hour south of the Turkish city of Sanliurfa. “No one listened. And that’s because no one cared.”
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