Erdogan Rising - Hannah Smith Lucinda

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Leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease spread by the sand flies living in the garbage, was tearing through the population, especially children. At a clinic set up by a local charity I watched distraught toddlers receive daily injections into their gaping sores. As we approached the city’s checkpoints, run by armed groups of increasingly hazy affiliation, my drivers and fixers would switch the music on their stereos to nasheed, a cappella chants about violence and loss beloved by the jihadis. On the road back to the Turkish frontier we passed through whole villages that had been recently flattened and abandoned.

      The revolutionary promise of two years before had sunk beneath a malodorous tide of tragedy; front lines were crystallising across Aleppo city, and hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes as the regime’s air force launched relentless raids on rebel territory. The death toll was in the tens of thousands, and the war’s descent into extremism had started. Syria was already well on the way to giving the world a grim litany of new cultural reference points – barrel bombing, chemical attacks, heart-eating rebels, and Isis.

      Crossing back over the border into Turkey at the end of any assignment in Syria was like stepping from a sepia film into full colour. Kilis, the first Turkish town after the Syrian frontier, is only forty miles from Aleppo as the crow flies. It is the beigest of any Turkish city, its tiny Ottoman heart smothered by rings and rings of new tower blocks housing masses of rural peasants. It would not feature in any Turkish guidebook, but compared to Aleppo it was paradise. Each time I came back I ripped off the black shawl I had used to cover my clothes, and drank in the colours hitting my eyes. After the privations of Aleppo, hot water, privacy, electricity and undisturbed sleep in a Turkish fleapit felt like a night at the Savoy.

       Summer 2013 Rebel-held Aleppo

      The most powerful rebel faction in Aleppo city in the summer of 2013 was the Liwa al-Tawhid, an Islamist militia led by Abdulkader al-Saleh, a diminutive former spice importer. He had assumed the nom de guerre of Hajji Marea, Hajji being the title bestowed on Muslims who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Marea being the spit-and-sawdust town north of the city he came from. The urbane and wealthy population of Aleppo had been none too pleased to find Hajji Marea and his brigade of bumpkins entering the city the previous summer and quickly carving it up, with the Tawhid and other rebel brigades controlling the poor, conservative districts to the east and the regime clinging to the wealthy west. There, the residents might have known their president was a tyrant, but many of them preferred to stick with the devil they knew rather than take their chances on the unknown, ragtag rebels.

      The Tawhid had built a slick PR operation, which I encountered within minutes of arriving in Aleppo on my first morning as a war reporter. We had driven directly to Ard al-Hamra, one of the chaotic neighbourhoods that made up almost all of eastern Aleppo. A Scud missile fired by Assad’s forces had hit it in the inky hours before sunrise, and the street in front of me – a little parade of honey-coloured houses – had been flattened. Children were running about on top of the rubble looking for salvageable and saleable remnants. The survivors had already been extracted, and so too had the identifiable bits of the dead. Severed body parts and smashed furnishings were all that was left under the dust. It was all so familiar from the news reports I had been watching over the past two years – crumbled houses, crying women, scowling men with guns slung over their shoulders – only now it was here in front of me in full HD. I was so transfixed that it took me a few seconds to realise that the hysterical children across the street were shouting at me, beckoning furiously and pointing at the space above my head. When I looked up, I saw that a huge chunk of stone, the corner of a dainty Juliet balcony, had cracked away from the building above me and was about to topple onto my head. I moved away and gave them a weak smile and a wave of thanks.

      Seconds later a lorry with its rear shutters rolled up backed screaming around the corner, and the people who had been milling about crowded around it. Here was the humanitarian face of the Tawhid rebels, who ruled by the gun but wanted the world’s media to show a different face. In front of my camera and that of a young media activist called Farouk, they started throwing out blankets and food packages to the waiting gaggle who surged forward to scrap over the goodies. Over the following months I would watch all the other armed rebel groups do the same, in a series of increasingly odd charity stunts that their media relations officers would then try to sell to foreign journalists and our fixers as worthy international news stories. Al-Qaeda set up a subsidised bus service. Others opened bakeries with money from unnamed Saudi or Kuwaiti donors, handing out bread to the poor but refusing to allow the male volunteers to serve women. Even Isis got in on the act, in the first months after it sprouted like a poisonous weed amid the misery and before it got down to ruling through fear alone. In August 2013 it organised a children’s fun day in Aleppo, where armed men in balaclavas watched over a group of six-year-olds embroiled in an ice cream-eating competition. As the day’s finale, a group of Isis fighters competed in a tug-of-war against a team from Al-Qaeda, treating their enthralled audience to the darkly comic spectacle of overweight and bearded men in thobes and sandals sweating as they grappled with the rope. Isis won – a nice metaphor for what happened a few months later. The two extremist groups – identical sartorially and ideologically – turned their guns on each other.

      The fixer I travelled into Aleppo with on that first assignment was a fat and slightly stupid guy called Mohammed who, like many others at that time, was making a wedge of cash off foreign reporters while doing little more than airing the Tawhid’s propaganda. Although Syrian by origin he had a distinct Iraqi accent, and had grown up in Baghdad. His father, a devout man from the conservative northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shugur, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood – a network of pious believers who preferred to live in the shadows until the onset of the Arab Spring beckoned them into the open.

      The Brotherhood is feared and loathed by the Middle East’s old authoritarian regimes because it provides a vision for an alternative system of government that appeals directly to the oppressed, using the world’s most powerful religious ideology as its glue. Distrusted but tolerated in the West, the Brotherhood was public enemy number one in the Arab world’s secular regimes, like Mubarak’s Egypt and Ben Ali’s Tunisia. In Syria, it was so hated that schoolchildren had to spew vitriol against it each morning as part of their ritual oath-giving to Assad’s Ba’athist state. In 1980, membership of the organisation was made punishable by death, and the Brothers retaliated with a series of increasingly violent protests and guerrilla attacks. Finally, in February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad sent his army to the city of Hama, epicentre of the Brotherhood’s uprising, where, over twenty-seven days, it besieged and bombarded the entire population. Up to 25,000 people were killed, but with media access restricted and no way for people inside the city to communicate with the outside world, it went virtually unreported. Everyone inside Syria heard about what happened, but their fear of what the regime might still do brought down a self-imposed omertà. Back then there was no independent media operating inside Syria and no internet to help the news leak out. The insurgency was crushed, whole city centres were destroyed. The remaining Brotherhood members were imprisoned or fled, and in Syria no one spoke of it again.

      In the aftermath of Hama, many of Syria’s surviving Brotherhood members fell into the arms of a willing patron, the one Middle Eastern strongman who saw that there might be a use for them – Saddam Hussein.

      The Iraqi president, though also a Sunni Muslim and a sectarian ruler, did not build an alliance with the Syrian Brotherhood out of religious conviction – later he would carry out his own crackdown on the Iraqi wing of the movement. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, Saddam’s main enemy was the Shia goliath Iran, to which Assad’s Syria was allied. By cuddling up to the Syrian Brotherhood, Saddam could undermine Damascus, his neighbour to the west, and in turn also Tehran, his neighbour to the east.

      Saddam had funded and trained the Syrian Brotherhood prior to 1982, and then opened his country to those who fled after the group’s revolt against Assad failed. Syrian Brotherhood families were given homes in Baghdad and lavished with generous benefits, just as the rest of Iraq was slipping into a gruelling poverty inflicted on them by their leader’s increasingly erratic behaviour. The war with Iran, which began in 1980, was to drag on for eight years. Two years after it ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait and

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