BEIRUT (AP) – The Aleppo that Ibrahim al-Haj’s son Laith was born into 10 months ago is now being destroyed.
The opposition-held districts of the Syrian city have been surrounded and under siege for months. Russian and Syrian warplanes are bombing the streets into rubble and government forces are chipping away at the pocket of opposition control. For the 270,000 people holding out there, everything is getting harder to find – food, drinkable water and fuel. Residents are planting vegetables in bomb craters and digging wells.
Al-Haj and his wife increasingly argue over what to do for Laith’s future. And there’s a more immediate issue: What to feed him. His mother is weaning him off breast milk, but there’s little else to give him. So he eats what his parents do. Grains, thyme and cracked wheat.
“It’s better than him not growing,” al-Haj said. Potatoes, the little boy’s favorite, are a distant dream. “The hardest thing about the siege is when your son asks you for something and you can’t get it for him.”
Families like al-Haj’s across Aleppo’s opposition-held eastern districts are wrestling with how to get by day to day. They’re also weighed down with the fear that all their dreams for the crown jewel of the opposition’s territory are on the verge of collapse.