Death in Aleppo

What power and determination allows human beings to dig through rubble with bare hands, in places that bulldozers cannot reach, in the search for survivors? I do not know, but it happens; I’ve seen it happen.

Airstrikes take buildings down to ground level, but willing hands dig for those left alive. I cannot name the kind of aircraft which dropped the bombs and missiles, but I know that the enemy is my brother; can anyone understand that? Like Cain and Abel, the crime is truly fraternal. The images in circulation only complicate matters. Emotions are dying within us. Sensations are dulled.

What do the images flooding social networks actually mean? They show something happening over there, somewhere close but beyond our senses. The water, the blood, the mangled limbs, the fear and the screaming never make their way out of the television and into our laps. These experiences are not walking among us. This is not happening to us, and as long as the situation remains this way we will never know how saint-like these hands are that do not hesitate to dig in the rubble. He who lifts life up from the death and destruction must be someone really special, from a sacred place. Those who celebrate life, while it is being exterminated all around them, must be of the same type. This is the sanctity of humanity and we know nothing else. We know who the devils are. We know those terrifying human beings who act like robots under remote control. Life has been reduced to pieces of rubble, attacked precisely by aircraft which return to their hangars unscathed.

Life-saving technology is absent as the blood flows. Death technology is found aplenty in the arsenals of the enemies. The bare hands scrabbling in the piles of rubble are the only evidence we have that today is not Judgement Day. They belong to those who refuse to wallow in their pain. This is not Judgement Day, although it may appear to be the end of the world for the residents of Aleppo. They harbour resentment in their hearts that even the Israelis could not imagine to be in the hearts of their enemies. On Judgement Day, people will ignore one another; each looking out for himself. The hands reaching out in Aleppo, though, are stretching towards everything that is holy as if they were in prayer. They won’t allow the shocking scenes they encounter to affect them, though the attacks are intended to drive the remaining few of the city’s inhabitants into asylum on the world’s sidewalks.

These war crimes possess a passion of their own, as though they are cleansing a place from an epidemic. The plague has been identified, leaving the criminals to purify the zone. It is an impossible situation, and yet those hands are still there, picking through the rubble in search of life.

Every time a battered, bruised but living body is brought to the surface, we rejoice. But how many children must we see removed from the rubble before we do something more than express our sorrow? How many more children must Syria sacrifice before the world acts; before it does more than condemn?

Two days ago, I saw people who were not holding rifles or occupying squares; they lifted the rubble with their saintly hands and dust fell everywhere. Then a shout of joy; success! A new-born baby removed and cleaned swiftly. It was a miracle; life came out of the dead. The miracle now is no longer for the war to end and for those who have left to return angrily to their houses. The miracle now is to remove a small soul from under demolished buildings that once housed many living, breathing souls going about their lives together. That is what death in Aleppo has come to.

Translated from Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 26 September 2016

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