Every
day, children from the Salaheddin district of Aleppo meet at the
local playground. They play war as the real one rages just a few
meters away. But the graves are slowly encroaching.
Majid, what
are you doing? "I'm watering mommy." Majid drags a large,
blue bucket -- so full that he can hardly carry it -- across the
withered grass. But why are you watering your mother?
The
13-year-old looks puzzled, as though it were the kind of idiotic
question that only outsiders might ask. "Because she's right
here," he says and pours the water onto a mound surrounded by a
few stones meant to mark the site as a grave. An old pine tree offers
a bit of shade, but so far, nothing seems to have taken root at the
place where Majid's mother is buried. "I have to water it. Then
something will grow for sure," he says with a steady voice as he
heads back to refill his bucket.
Majid's
mother died in the summer, but nobody in the family had enough money
for a proper gravestone or even a border for the site. She died
"because of her heart," Majid says "in her mid-30s."
He can't be more precise than that; nobody in Aleppo really asks
anymore why someone is dead. Majid drags a third bucket-full to the
grave, as though seeking to atone for something he played no part in,
as if he could score a tiny victory against all the dying.
He then
returns to the other children playing in the sand nearby. The
playground has a swing set, a teeter-totter, a slide and a small pile
of sand, and it is the last one remaining in the Salaheddin district
in the heart of Aleppo. They come every day, sometimes a dozen,
sometimes 15 kids from the neighborhood. The younger ones fill up
plastic bottle-halves with sand on the pile. "We're cooking!"
yells the five-year-old Juju. The older children play war. Together,
they swing on the bars and race down the slide.
Nearby,
shots can be heard, sometimes isolated, other times entire salvos.
Periodic explosions shake the surrounding buildings. But Majid, Juju
and the others don't pay any attention. Not because they
underestimate the danger, but because they know it so well. "Mortar,"
11-year-old Emad says in response to a muffled boom. "Tank
rounds sound different." They have a higher pitch, he says.
Peculiar
Rules for Survival
The children
of Aleppo have ears trained for the noises that accompany death,
especially those who play in Salaheddin's last playground. It lies
directly on the front. The next street over is in the firing line of
regime snipers, which is why a barrier has been erected at the
intersection next to the playground. The playground wall facing that
side of the city is like a borderline between life and death. The
odor of decomposing bodies sometimes hangs in the air nearby.
Peculiar
rules for survival have been established in Syria. One of those is
that the closer you are to the front, the lower the risk is from
"barrel bombs," those steel containers full of explosives
and metal balls that can weigh up to one ton. These bombs are thrown
out of helicopters flying at an altitude of thousands of meters and
are frequently blown off course by the wind. The helicopters avoid
places where government troops and rebel fighters are separated by
only 100 meters. And here, a place separated from the other side by
just a single housing block, not even tank shells are a risk.
Everywhere
else in the eastern half of this metropolis, a city that once had
over 2 million residents, death rains down from the sky more often
than ever before. The number of barrel bombs has doubled since
October and even tripled in other cities in northern Syria. And once
again, the Syrian army is on the cusp of surrounding the rebels in
Aleppo.
On the
playground, however, the situation is strangely normal. Within view
of the war, children are sliding, swinging and teeter-tottering --
and one of the words they use most is "adi," meaning
normal. The fact that they are playing directly adjacent to the
snipers' line of fire: "adi." The fact that the burial
sites are coming ever closer: "adi." The fact that many of
their fathers, brothers or cousins have disappeared or been killed:
"adi." That they themselves have often seen death: "adi."
Emad, Majid
and their friend Ahmed, 13, don't play in the sand anymore. That's
for babies, they say. "We play Assad's army and rebels,"
Ahmed says in his high-pitched voice. Puberty still lies ahead of
him. "We fight, stage ambushes and take prisoners!"
Sometimes they sneak out from behind the shack, he says, other times
they stay close to the wall for protection, but they never leave the
playground premises. And they don't venture into the ruins of the
neighborhood. "Mommy says we're not allowed," he says.
Shrinking
Playground
He says that
his parents have been able to easily see the playground since their
building was bombed: "The wall with the windows is now gone,"
he says. And he says that he and his friends play fair. "Sometimes
one side wins, sometimes the other -- depending on who has the better
ambush!" Only one child in the group has a real toy Kalashnikov.
The others are left to assemble weapons out of sticks, twine and bits
of plastic.
Thousands of
people in Aleppo, many of them children, have been blown up, shot or
crushed under the rubble of their collapsing homes. But for those who
have managed to survive, kids who have experienced nothing but war
for much of their lives, the surrounding inferno has become a prosaic
fact of life. They just keep on playing. Here, at least.
But the
space available for their games gets a bit smaller each week. The
once idyllic park with the old pine trees is one of the last
remaining open spaces in the area -- and the dead have to be buried
somewhere. Now, they have found a final resting place here. And when
Ahmed and the others aren't in the middle of a game, they water the
methodically arranged graves, many of which don't even have a name
plate. The martyrs, the fallen rebels and district residents can be
found right near the entrance. In the back right, near the wall
separating the park from the snipers' firing lines, are the regime
soldiers and the "shabiha," the militia predominantly
recruited from among the district's petty criminals.
Underneath
the pile of sand where the younger children play are the remains of
three jihadists who detonated themselves nearby at the beginning of
January. "There might have been four. There were so many parts,
it was hard to tell," says Emad. "The guys from the
revolution poured sand on them." They didn't like the jihadists
anyway, the others say. "They always hit us and constantly
wanted to push us into the mosque to pray. But we wanted to play."
The mound,
and the sand which is so good for playing, is only there because
fanatics from Islamic State preferred to blow themselves up than to
retreat when Syrian rebels sought to drive them out of the city at
the beginning of the year. But because people didn't know which arm
belonged to which led, they couldn't be buried in proper graves. So
the bloody body parts were buried under sand, and then more sand,
until eventually, a mound was formed.
The Whole
Story
"But we
only water the martyrs!" the kids say. It is an important detail
and Emad repeats it several times. Just as Majid carries bucket after
bucket of water to his mother's grave, the others care for the graves
of their family members as well. It is as though the small gesture
gives them a sense of stability amid the chaos surrounding them:
"Don't water the wrong graves!" It isn't their war. But it
is their fathers, brothers, cousins and mothers who die. They lie
here, only a stone's throw from those who fought alongside the
murderers. Those graves don't get any water from the children.
Ahmed's
older brother went off in search of bread once when the local bakery
was unable to bake more. That was two years ago. He never came back.
Ahmed's cousin wanted to have his hair cut. He too disappeared, as
did Emad's brother. They could have gone looking for them; there is
even a center in Aleppo where pictures of anonymous corpses are
collected. A retired policeman at the center collects their
possessions in small bags and enters the date and place they were
found in a notebook. But such a search costs money, time and energy,
valuable resources that most in Aleppo need for survival.
Does he
believe that his brother might someday return? Emad clicks his tongue
and tosses his head back. He is silent for a moment before clearing
his throat. "My brother went away and didn't come back. That is
the whole story."
It isn't a
taboo to speak of such things. It is just hopeless to expect an
answer. Majid's father was arrested and never came back. The fathers
of two other children were likewise simply taken away at checkpoints.
'I Just
Want My Daddy Back'
Only
five-year-old Hassan doesn't want to say why his father was taken
away, or even admit that he is gone. He is close to tears when
another boy says quietly: "But he's been dead for a long time
now." Hassan hears him and becomes furious, cocks his fist and
then lets his arm fall to his side in resignation. "I just want
my daddy back."
Even as the
growing number of graves eats away at the playground from two sides,
a lush vegetable garden approaches from a third. One of the neighbors
planted the garden in the spring, which angered local rebel leaders,
who had declared the entire site as a cemetery.
"They
want me to go away," complains Bakri Mahsoum, "but I have
been watering the park here for years and take care of the garden
every day. The zucchini, tomatoes and okra are for everybody in the
district." The fact that his garden grew over two graves a while
back, with the zucchini plants winding around the steles, hasn't made
things any easier.
Death and
gardens, graves and zucchini, sandboxes atop body parts, this small
place has everything that has characterized Aleppo for months:
unfathomable lunacy beneath a thin veneer of normalcy.
A shot rings
out. A cat had climbed up onto the roof of a damaged shed near the
dangerous side and a boy who is new to the area climbed up after him.
He was briefly in view of the other side. Luckily, nobody was hurt
and the cat jumped back down. The gardener yells from behind his
shrubs that they shouldn't climb up there, it's dangerous.
Not even a
minute later, though, the incident is forgotten. Ahmed says that his
friend Samir had been shot in the arm the day before when he was
trying to help his father -- who had been trying to pull a wounded
neighbor out of the field of fire. They used to go out with their
families on Fridays, they say. They would go to the countryside to
visit their grandparents or maybe just down the street for an ice
cream. "Yeah, that was nice," Majid says quietly. He is
almost whispering, as though it was somehow dangerous to revisit the
old memories.
Missing
School
School too
has faded into the past. Early on, two-and-a-half long years ago,
classes continued despite the fighting, Majid remembers. "But
then the rockets came and we moved from one school to the next, and
then into the cellar." But at some point, fewer and fewer
children showed up. Their families had fled or been killed, or they
were simply too scared to allow their children out of the house any
more. Majid says he misses school. More than that, though, he misses
the 16- and 17-year-old sisters Nur and Riim who used to teach them
reading, writing and English here on the playground. "They were
nice to us!"
Now, the two
sisters are lying beneath them, in the nicest grave in the
playground. It is marked by a marble slab engraved with the names of
all those family members killed by a bomb last spring. Their mother
comes every day, sometimes bringing along a friend, as she has today.
The two talk about what is worse: losing children, as she as, or
losing a husband, like her friend. They haven't reached a consensus
by the time they depart, leaving the marble to the children. They
like to sit there in the afternoon autumn sun.
Where will
you go when the whole place is filled with graves or if you have to
flee from Assad's troops?
"Then
we'll go play somewhere else," they shout, almost in unison. But
they'll have to come back periodically, Majid insists, and the others
nod as though they had just remembered something that had momentarily
slipped their minds. "I have to bring water for mommy,"
Majid says.
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