Aleppo before the war was my favorite place: Column

I’m a travel writer, which means I’m often asked, “So, what’s your favorite place in the world?”

For more than a decade, my answer was Syria, especially the city of Aleppo. Most people seemed a little disappointed with this answer — they had been fishing for a usable travel tip. And for most people, Syria was not a possible summer vacation. It was too far, too foreign, too much on the wrong side of the ever-shifting Global War on Terror.

But if they had visited, they would have found, as I did, fresh and meticulously prepared food, beautiful handicrafts and astonishing old buildings that spoke to a depth of history we just don’t have here in America. And more important, they would have met the Syrians themselves — the real reason I loved the country and visited three times between 1999 and 2009. On every trip, I found the people of Syria to be uncommonly kind, gracious and interested in the world.

At critical junctures in the Syrian war, such as the one this week, when regime forces retook eastern Aleppo and Twitter filled with messages from trapped civilians saying goodbye, I open up my collection of photos from my trips. I pore over each one, looking at the faces of the people.

There is the older man who ran the tiny Aleppo bike shop, barely bigger than a closet. My husband and I happened to walk by the shop at lunchtime, and this man sat us down and offered us his bowl of spiced lamb in tomato sauce. When he heard we had no children, he said he’d give us a bike when we had our first — blue for a boy, pink for a girl. In the photo, taken by a neighboring shop owner, the three of us are crammed in the corner of the shop, under a display of kids’ bicycles and around the desk-turned-dining table, newspaper as a tablecloth. The man stares into the camera, patient but eyebrows slightly raised, as if to say, “Take the picture — lunch is getting cold.” The hair at his temples is gray.

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There’s another photo I love, half a dozen kids and a couple of adults on a sidewalk at the entrance to a park. One of the kids, a young teenager, is the vendor of tamarind and licorice juices, dispensed from clear glass tanks. He’s looking down, shy but pleased — he had just asked me whether people in America drink tamarind juice, and insisted I try his for free. He is dressed like a businessman-to-be, in a short-sleeve plaid dress shirt and polyester slacks cinched with a slim black belt.

There’s the series of photos of young men I met at the market, single dudes with experimental facial hair and cocky swaggers. They saw my camera and demanded I take their pictures, then leaped into clowning poses. In one, the man closest to the camera has a tiny scar on his forehead, the kind you get when you trip and fall as a toddler. The youngest, thinnest man smiles awkwardly, embarrassed by his exuberant friends, his face in shadow from his “New York” baseball cap.

And there are plenty of other people in my head who were never captured in photos. The boisterous man at the bar who saw me admiring his DIY salad — cucumbers on ice, a bowl of tomatoes, a knife — and sent me and my husband a portion, sliced just for us. The old tailor, small with white hair and big, gentle eyes, who made several fine dress shirts for my husband. The three young mothers who surrounded me on a park bench, their pales faces standing out from all-black coats and scarves. They squeezed my arms and peppered me with friendly questions, and I regret to this day that my Arabic failed in the moment and I could not understand them. They walked away laughing, their children turning back to wave.

These people aren’t close friends of mine. They are people I spent a few minutes with, maybe an hour. I don’t know where they are today — in Syria still, or maybe in a muddy refugee camp in Greece or Lebanon. Maybe they have been killed, or lost family members. Certainly none of them is untouched by the war. 

Now when I mention Syria, people usually ask, “What should we be doing there?”

This I can’t begin to answer. We should have done many things, a long time ago — but now? I have no idea how to stop the war. I’m a civilian, like the people in these photos. I don’t have any stake in Syria beyond the personal knowledge that decent, lovely people have suffered immeasurably, for no other crime than being born at a certain time, in a certain place.

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Yet for five years, ideologues and pundits have rushed to condemn one "side" or the other, have tracked militias and analyzed strategies as if commenting on a football game. American and European politicians have stoked fear of refugees, so that precious few of the more than 5 million who have fled Syria have been able to leave camps and restart their lives.

And I can’t help but wonder: If more Americans had known Syrian people, or even just seen snapshots like mine, would the war have reached this terrible pitch? Would our cap on Syrian refugees be set so shamefully low? There is a shortage of images from Syria at peace. In the news media now, we see only people in crisis — bloodied children, parents wailing with grief. Not like us, it’s easy to think, and push the images aside.

Yet if you were to look at my pictures or anyone’s from Syria before 2011 as I do, pausing to look carefully at each face, you would notice familiar manners, gestures, expressions. In a boy’s half-smile, I see every impish kid I’ve known. In the way a man places his hand on his hip and looks away, laughing, I see a friend’s reaction to a familiar joke. And the bike store owner’s mustache, his tanned skin, his patient look — I see my own father.

Look closely: I hope you too will see people you recognize.

Zora O’Neill is a travel journalist and author of the memoirAll Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World. Follow her on Twitter @zora.

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