Destruction of Aleppo

From 5 August 2012: Even knowing that it is unconscionably tacky to bemoan a personal loss when people are fighting and dying in the streets, the battle for Aleppo hurts me personally. It is yet another of the world’s most exciting places I’ll never see because it is being ruined by war. In all the commentary in the news media lately, not a single report that I have read has mentioned the ancient, historic souq, or market, of old Aleppo. It is the largest covered market in the world, with an approximate length of 13 kilometers and labyrinthine alleyways, many covered by ancient stone arches, adding to a total length of 32 kilometers. At 50 centuries, it is the world’s oldest. A souq in any language is the soul of a country. Tourists flock to Istanbul to see its famous, ancient spice market, which would fit into a small corner of Aleppo’s souq. I have never been to Aleppo. While working in Jordan 10 years ago, I read an article about the souq of Aleppo in the Jordanian Times and resolved to see it sometime. Alas, with the Syrian rebels digging into the old city and battling the government with captured tanks while government jets and helicopters bombard it, I fear there may not be much left to see when the fighting stops. Aleppo’s souq is the latest in a long line of the world’s most valuable cultural heritage sites ruined by war. The first on my personal wish list to fall was the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I read about it in 1962 in a short story by Dorothy Gilman Butters in the Ladies Home Journal, “Sorrow rides a fast horse.” In it, a mother, grief-stricken from the death of her husband, takes her two children on a whirl-wind trip around the world. In the Khyber Pass, her family and their elderly guide are captured by bandits. Their leader speaks to the guide, who translates. “Are they going to capture us?” she asks anxiously. “They already have, “says the guide. They don't want just the money, the food, and the donkeys. They want the woman and the children. The guide says sadly, “It must by your qismat—your fate—to stop here.” She says harshly, “My qismat? Tell this man I must travel like the wind—that is my qismat. Tell him that Sorrow rides behind me on a fast horse—if he listens closely, he may hear the hoof beats. Tell him that if he captures me, he will capture Sorrow as well—because where I go Sorrow goes and where I stop, Sorrow will stop.” The bandits confer. Their leader finally makes a statement. The guide translates: “He says it has been a hard year, with many people dead in their village. Sheep have sickened and died. He says they do not wish for more Sorrow. If Sorrow follows behind you then you must leave these mountains at once. You must not stop even to sleep.” To ensure their prompt departure, the bandits guide them through the Khyber Pass. After reading this story at age 15, I wanted to see the Khyber Pass for myself. Sadly, I waited too long and Sorrow returned. Traders on the Silk Road traversed it. Darius the Great, King of Persia from 522 to 486 BC, took his army through it. So did Alexander the Great in 326 BC. In 1220 Genghis Khan led his Mongol army through it to conquer Arabia. Britain fought three wars over it from 1839 to 1919. Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in “Ballad of the King’s Jest”: “When spring-time flushes the desert grass, Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass. Lean are the camels but fat the frails, Light are the purses but heavy the bales, As the snowbound trade of the North comes down To the market-square of Peshawur town.” Kipling set the one of the central events in his book, Kim, in the Khyber Pass and called it “a sword cut through the mountains.” The book describes “the great game,” the cold war between Britain and Russia for imperial hegemony in Afghanistan. Winston Churchill, then a young newspaper correspondent, in 1897 said of the Khyber Pass, “Each rock and hill along the pass had a story to tell! “ In December, 1979, when Russia seized Afghanistan, one of their invasion routes was eastward from Kabul through the Khyber Pass. In the 1980s, the mujahedeen used it to attack the Russians. In 2001, the USA used it to attack the Taliban. The world was outraged when the Taliban destroyed the monumental statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, but hardly murmured when the Baghdad Archaeological Museum was left unprotected by invading American forces two years later. That museum, founded by Gertrude Bell nearly a century ago, was another on my list. Bell was a British adventurer and archaeologist who in 1913 defied Ottoman authorities in Damascus, bought some camels, hired a guide, and marched into the desert in search of rumoured wonders of the ancient world. Mapping and cataloguing ancient ruins, along the way she met and befriended the Shaykhs of the major Bedouin tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. She escaped Turkish authorities near what is now Amman, Jordan, and was jailed in Ha’il, in what is now Saudi Arabia, by the Emir Muhammad al Rashid. Her writings opened up the Arabian deserts to the world, and her knowledge of the Bedouin tribes made her a valuable mentor to C. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”, who was no scholar and just in it for the glory) and advisor to Winston Churchill and the other Western leaders in the First World War and its aftermath. It was she who actually put pen to paper and drew the boundaries of the new nations of Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Her friendship with King Faisal facilitated founding of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, using her own collection as a start. For nearly a century it was the best in the world for Middle East history and prehistory. Now the museum, like the artifacts it once housed, is a relic. Another place I always wanted to see was Timbuktu, in what is now Mali. Although its very name evokes, in Western culture, one of the most remote places on the planet, it was, since the 12th Century, a center of Arab scholarship. It hosts an Islamic university and houses tens of thousands of priceless manuscripts from a time when Europe had hardly emerged from the Dark Ages. In April of this year it was overrun by Tuareg rebels, and just weeks ago, in July, Islamists began destroying ancient tombs of Muslim saints. Timbuktu no doubt will still be worth visiting when peace returns, but it won’t be the same. This has happened so often in my life that I feel as if the culture of my species is being bled dry. When the Japanese occupied Korea in the Second World War, they destroyed and stole much of the country’s ancient heritage; and during the Cultural Revolution in China, zealots destroyed countless thousands of Buddhist temples. I’ve seen some in both countries that were later rebuilt, but there is a sadness in seeing only modern reconstructions. Each time, we all lose something precious. It is the cultural equivalent of the ancient Chinese torture, “death by a thousand cuts.” As a child, I read about the splendour of the ancient monuments at Angkor Wat, an ancient Khmer kingdom in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, for all their other failings, protected it, but after their fall in 1979, in the governance vacuum, an industrial-scale army of thieves stripped most of its beautiful carvings and statues. I finally did see Angkor Wat, but the missing statues and art, crudely hacked from the stones, were so depressing that I almost wish I hadn’t. In the 18th through early 20th Centuries, European and North African wars were led by aristocrats, and these educated gentlemen went to great lengths to avoid destroying the cultural heritage of their enemies, realizing that war is transitory and heritage is forever. I doubt that the military officer training at Sandhurst,Saint-Cyr, West Lincoln, Dresden, Anapolis and West Point covers these subjects in much detail. All war is wrong, but war that targets cultural heritage is especially heinous. It is time to re-introduce a more sensitive tone to military campaigns in all venues possible (such as international treaties and officer training) and elevate the level of cultural crimes in international courts to crimes against humanity. ___________________